Vermont Everyone Eats Program, Resilience within Covid-19
Document Type
Book
Files
Publication Date
Fall 9-17-2024
Description
Food systems connect and represent interconnected subsystems. Often times when any one subsystem experiences a challenge, others will be impacted. The COVID-19 pandemic created multiple interconnected challenges for people in Vermont, including heightened food insecurity, economic struggles, and supply chain vulnerabilities. It is important to reflect on the ways in which Vermont’s food systems responded to these hardships, so we can plan and respond to future unknown, yet inevitable crises. Resilience is not an outcome or stable state to be accomplished; rather it is a continuous, social process of making sense of, responding to, and bouncing forward from hardship. While resilience is represented in grand formal policies at the systems-level, it can also be seen as informal processes occurring through small, informal actions and everyday interactions (Buzzanell, 2010; Matsen, 2001). While resilience is a process that occurs across societal, community, and individual levels, these literatures do not often borrow from one another. This study merges theoretical concepts from two resilience literatures in the social sciences (1) Buzzanell’s (2010) Communication Theory of Resilience and (2) Matsen’s (2001) theory of Ordinary Magic. To highlight the ways in which these theories complement each other, this research poster uses a case study model to explore how Vermont Everyone Eats cultivated a strong state-wide feeding program to address food insecurity at the community-level. Specifically, this study looks at how VEE contributed to community resilience during the pandemic in Vermont. And, if, and how, resilience was accomplished as ordinary magic in the VEE emergency food insecurity response program. Theoretical and practical implications will be examined.
City
Burlington, Vermont
Keywords
Food systems resilience, pandemic response, Vermont Everyone Eats (VEE), community resilience, Communication Theory of Resilience, Ordinary Magic theory
Recommended Citation
Patane, Robert, "Vermont Everyone Eats Program, Resilience within Covid-19" (2024). Food Systems Summit 2024. 31.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fss2024/31
