Who Cares for Communities? Conceptualizing Non-Profit Work as Social Reproduction Through the Case of Food Banks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".