Charitable food provision as an 'emergency' response: where do we go from here?

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite, Birmingham Fellow and CHASM Associate, Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, University of Birmingham

In the past five years in the UK, we have seen a steep rise in the number of people seeking emergency food aid in the form of charitable provision, signalling permanence to the existence of food banks. In Canada and the USA, there is a much longer history of charitable food provision. This seminar firstly presents findings from Kayleigh’s own work on foodbank use, before introducing current work which focuses on the importance of understanding the relationship between the institutionalisation of charitable food aid within different contexts. There is an urgent need to engage with what can be learnt from the transatlantic context here in the UK, and vice versa.

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Hear Kayleigh speak about her research at the seminar below: