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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Two
Spring 2003
Food Not Bombs: Community Breakdown
and Reconstruction - Page 3
by Nicole Wines
Food Not Bombs Hoboken also had the problem of dealing with an area that saw a very small amount of civic engagement to begin with. One reason for this may be a general lack of solidarity and interest within the community. It is discouraging to members of the group to try to keep a disinterested public aware of its presence, much less attempt to build up community where none exists. One possible reason for this lack of community is that many people's lives are isolated or fragmented. Most of the people who now live in Hoboken commute to New York City where they have jobs that keep them very busy. When so many of the people who live there have little or no stake in the area, aside from its being a cheaper place to live in than Manhattan, it is difficult to reach them about local issues, and this can be related to Putnam's theory of "demographic transformations" (65) as a cause of diminishing social capital. It seems that most people in Hoboken do not even know their next-door neighbor's name (this was pointed out by a current Food Not Bombs member and Hoboken resident). Putnam relates informal social capital to good neighborliness, but shows that this is also decreasing, "The proportion of Americans who socialize with their neighbors more than once a year has slowly but steadily declined over the last two decades, from 72 percent in 1974 to 61 percent in 1993" (63). These are the people it is most difficult to reach and it seems almost impossible to be able to get them involved in community activities or even to support them.
Besides trying to get the community involved, it was also difficult for Food Not Bombs Hoboken to keep up its own members' interest in the organization. There was a shift in the intended ideology, from a protest against nuclear weapons and unequal distribution of wealth and resources to a soup kitchenesque charity that handed out food to the homeless without making it visible to the community and forcing the community to address the problem. This ideological shift resulted in several members leaving the group, and made members lose sight of the goal of being community based and oriented. The group became isolated from the community, which was also a consequence of the decreased visibility of its activities. It is important to not only keep a feeling of community within the group, but between the group and the community it is active in. "Community relations is a dynamic process of communication between the community and the organization to discover how you can better serve and to convey how your organization is responding to that information" (Yarrington 10). Without any communication, it is impossible to gain community support which could make the group stronger. It is the community surrounding the organization that can make it strong and provide support and help, but that was exactly what Food Not Bombs Hoboken was lacking. No communication meant no civic engagement of the community.
Several months after the disbanding of the Hoboken Food Not Bombs chapter, two of its original members attempted to restart the group. This time there was more of a focus on the community in Hoboken instead of on bringing in activists from outside the community. Flyers were hung up several times all over Hoboken, and e-mails were sent to every person who had previously displayed interest in helping. Now, meetings are held at a community-oriented health food market, and the group is attempting to reach out to the community while at the same time contributing to it. In this task, they face several problems. Finding people within the community who are willing to volunteer their time is difficult; as stated above, many people who now live in Hoboken are New York City commuters without much free time. Trying to build community where there is currently none to speak of can be frustrating if there is very little response, but Hoboken Food Not Bombs is already attempting to tackle this by first reaching out to the groups of people who are most likely to respond positively, such as other associational groups working out of the Hoboken Multicultural Center, and people who are more likely to have lived in Hoboken for their whole lives rather than the commuter population. They must also avoid the same traps that led to the disbanding of the previous Food Not Bombs group in Hoboken. In order to do this, they must keep in mind the importance of community to the group and not loose sight of their current goal of building community.