6/21/2023 0 Comments Reflections social work journalThe residents’ shortages of both finances and food resulted in a heightened importance to be placed on the collection from Greggs bakery. Moreover, this approach to food revealed a gap between formal policy and ‘street level’, (Lipsky, 1980), micro level practices. I was struck by how staff used access to the valued cooked food to administer a regime of reward and punishment and how the project workers would justify consuming these products themselves.įood distribution of the most desired products rested on an unwritten code that differentiated ‘deserving’ from ‘undeserving’ residents, reflecting ‘a discursive separation between deserving and undeserving poor’, (Boone et al, 2018, p2384). The practices I witnessed during my placement made me reflect deeply on, the centrality of food in social work contexts and the importance of reflexive engagement with this issue in social work training and practice.Īt the scheme, Thursdays were the residents’ favourite a collection from Greggs bakery of sausage rolls, donuts, and baked pastries. Writing at a time of social unrest, during which football star Marcus Rashford has put debates around free school meals on the political centre stage, it is pertinent to address the states approach to food supply for some of the country’s most vulnerable. įood insecurity was not an issue I had previously considered, and in researching for this article I was made aware of the real lack of literature regarding the existence of this phenomenon in England. 'Food insecurity refers to a situation where individuals have inadequate access to the resources that are necessary for a nutritious diet' (Burgess and Shier, 2018, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015 ). Defining food insecurity in the journal International Social Work, Burgess and Shier draw on a definition provided by the United Nations as follows: I will to focus on the dynamics of a particular weekly food surplus collection as this I will argue illustrates many salient issues around power and food insecurity. The key workers at the scheme arranged up to five visits a year to the local food bank when requested although predominantly the residents relied on weekly collections of food with little or no re-sale value from supermarkets and local businesses. All of the resident service users receive state benefits in differing but limited amounts. Their presence in the scheme has been a consequence of unique experiences of neglect, abuse, trauma, loss, and marginalisation. What brought these young people to live together is a shared experience of state involvement in their childhood and the local authority’s duty to house them under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. The setting of my first social work placement was a local authority contracted scheme that provides accommodation for young people with high support needs (the scheme).
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