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Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper examines food provisioning initiatives that were implemented to reduce food insecurity during the period of the spread of Covid-19. Food insecurity increased sharply during this time, particularly among those who contracted the virus and had to remain in quarantine, and those who suddenly...

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Autor principal: Cattivelli, Valentina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9561455/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36267360
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104034
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author Cattivelli, Valentina
author_facet Cattivelli, Valentina
author_sort Cattivelli, Valentina
collection PubMed
description This paper examines food provisioning initiatives that were implemented to reduce food insecurity during the period of the spread of Covid-19. Food insecurity increased sharply during this time, particularly among those who contracted the virus and had to remain in quarantine, and those who suddenly lost their jobs. As a possible solution to alleviate the problem, voluntary organisations collected food from stores with surplus produce (such as restaurants that were forced to close, supermarkets, etc.) and redistributed it to people in need. This redistribution occurred in several Italian cities, including Cremona, which was one of the first towns in Italy to be dramatically affected by the pandemic. Looking through the lens of social innovation theory, this paper analyses redistribution initiatives in this town and assesses their capacity to enhance their impact on social wellbeing and to involve local society in response to social challenges. Thanks to desk research and interviews with several volunteers, it demonstrates that these initiatives are good examples of social innovation, as they address emerging social challenges and generate benefits for the entire society (not just food aid recipients), reconfigure previous aid models, actively involve local population, and assume educational and social assistance purposes.
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spelling pubmed-95614552022-10-16 Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic Cattivelli, Valentina Cities Article This paper examines food provisioning initiatives that were implemented to reduce food insecurity during the period of the spread of Covid-19. Food insecurity increased sharply during this time, particularly among those who contracted the virus and had to remain in quarantine, and those who suddenly lost their jobs. As a possible solution to alleviate the problem, voluntary organisations collected food from stores with surplus produce (such as restaurants that were forced to close, supermarkets, etc.) and redistributed it to people in need. This redistribution occurred in several Italian cities, including Cremona, which was one of the first towns in Italy to be dramatically affected by the pandemic. Looking through the lens of social innovation theory, this paper analyses redistribution initiatives in this town and assesses their capacity to enhance their impact on social wellbeing and to involve local society in response to social challenges. Thanks to desk research and interviews with several volunteers, it demonstrates that these initiatives are good examples of social innovation, as they address emerging social challenges and generate benefits for the entire society (not just food aid recipients), reconfigure previous aid models, actively involve local population, and assume educational and social assistance purposes. Elsevier Ltd. 2022-12 2022-10-14 /pmc/articles/PMC9561455/ /pubmed/36267360 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104034 Text en © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Cattivelli, Valentina
Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title_full Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title_fullStr Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title_full_unstemmed Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title_short Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic
title_sort social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the covid-19 pandemic
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9561455/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36267360
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.104034
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