Who Cares for Communities? Conceptualizing Non-Profit Work as Social Reproduction Through the Case of Food Banks

This article conceptualizes non-profit labour as a form of social reproduction, a feminist political economy category that refers to the labour involved in the making of life and tending to it. In the contemporary context of neoliberal austerity in Canada, non-profit organizations have increasingly stepped in to fill widening gaps in essential social provisioning. The predominantly female non-profit workforce within these organizations, parallel to feminized household labour, faces systemic undervaluation and invisibilization, reflected in low wages, chronic underfunding, and austerity policies that work to destabilize the sector as a whole. Via the case study of food banks, we seek to make visible these vital, life-sustaining and community reproducing labours, drawing attention to their political agency and social power. While we write from within critiques of food banks as a symptom of neoliberal retrenchment, we resist conflating the labour and relationships within these organizations with the critiques of the political economic conditions in which they operate. Instead, we argue that the labours of social reproduction that occur within food banks hold political potential that is at odds with the (ostensibly) depoliticized approach to charity that is favoured in neoliberal modes of social provisioning. Providing food for communities, like other social reproduction activities, is not merely a response to gaps in formal government or market provisioning, but is agentic life-making labour driven by dictates beyond capital accumulation.