The pandemic showed us what we always knew: that in times of crisis, people step up and demonstrate the best of humanity. Across the UK, we saw stories of volunteers packing food parcels, donation crates full of food and essentials, and heartfelt community appeals, shared online, responded to by hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
These acts of generosity are not new. Across the Community Organisers Network, I have been witness to the support that frontline community organisations have been providing to people when the system falls short. What we have seen is compassion in action. However, over the past couple of years, through listening to local people and organisations and hearing the stories of their work, I have started to reflect on how the well-intentioned interventions of community organisations are masking something much more systemic.
Their work, addressing the symptoms, means that, for many, they do not have the time to acknowledge and address the root cause of what is driving the issue such as our dependence on foodbanks – in the first place.
Foodbanks as a parallel welfare system
Foodbanks were never meant to be permanent. Yet they’ve become deeply embedded in our communities – functioning as a form of a parallel welfare system. For many, especially the four in five users who come from non-working households, they have become a lifeline. But lifelines, when overused, become crutches that people rely on. This doesn’t help anyone in the long-term.
When charity becomes the default response to poverty, it risks normalising deprivation. It lets policymakers off the hook. Worse still, it blurs the line between emergency aid and everyday survival, subtly embedding the idea that ‘this is just how life is now’. This shift has dangerous consequences. It creates a culture of economic inactivity, not through personal failure, but because the system has quietly sanctioned inertia– often because of the simple fact there’s just not enough to do something about the causes.
If foodbanks are always there, if benefits remain transactional and insufficient, and if work is increasingly insecure or unavailable, the incentive and confidence to re-engage with society economically, socially, and civically – slowly fades. Foodbanks, in this context, are at risk of becoming another layer of passive welfare, one that erodes personal agency. Instead of helping people get back on their feet, they may unwittingly hold them in place. Not by intentional design, but by making long-term hardship feel manageable enough not to question or ask why.
The collapse of connection and the devaluation of work
This has led to a devaluation not only of work, but more importantly of connection.
Paid employment has always been about more than just income. It’s about structure, identity, purpose, and participation in a shared social project. A strong society relies on people contributing, and being rewarded, for their work.
And let’s not pretend foodbanks are ‘neutral ground’ – many are now propped up by the same companies, the employment practices of which contribute to the poverty that they claim to help relieve. Supermarkets donate leftover food for PR points. Charities compete for visibility. Politicians are able to make quiet calculations that, if communities are fed, there’s no need to fix what’s broken.
How welfare lost its humanity
All of this has stripped welfare of its humanity.
Where once the welfare state was imagined as a form of collective care, it has now become a bureaucratic transaction: impersonal, suspicious, and isolating. A system designed to foster solidarity has become one that polices need and punishes vulnerability.
If we truly want to restore humanity, we need to rebuild from the ground up. Not with food parcels, but with dignity. Not with dependence, but with agency and power. And not by creating more stopgaps, but by demanding a system that provides both opportunity and support in equal measure.
Rebuilding systems that restore agency, not dependence
There will always be a need for emergency aid. But what we have to do means reconnecting welfare to work not through coercion, but through real opportunity. It means designing systems that lift people out of hardship through connection, training, meaningful employment, and the restoration of confidence. It means starting with people, not policies – with neighbourhood-level trust and community-led solidarity.
A society that relegates millions of people to permanent foodbank reliance isn’t just failing them – it’s failing itself.
This article was first published by Bylines Times in August 2025 and has been reproduced with kind permission. Read the original here.
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