Challenging the Stigma Around Food Assistance

Public perceptions of government food assistance are often shaped by stigma, but School of Communication Associate Director Rebecca de Souza wants to shift the narrative.

De Souza believes that access to food is a human right – not a commodity. Through her work and role as a core researcher at the San Diego State University Center for Communication, Health, and the Public Good, she advocates for food justice and awareness of the struggles many face in feeding themselves.

De Souza teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in the School of Communication about these topics, including COMM 427 Health Communication and Cultural Communities and COMM 421 Health Communication and Community Based Service Learning. De Souza said in COMM 421, her students go out and volunteer at real food pantries.

De Souza led a keynote speech and workshop in March at the Come to the Table Conference, a biennial event hosted by the Rural Advancement Foundation International. 

De Souza has been involved within the organization' s network for a few years, and was invited to discuss stigma in food pantries, as well as a range of other topics related to food access and how neoliberalism negatively impacts food assistance.

De Souza’s keynote was titled “Charity, Hunger, and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” The speech addressed struggles that many nonprofits face, such as funding restrictions and pressure to stay politically neutral. De Souza said that even after nonprofits are created, there is still much work to be done for them to have a significant impact.

“We cannot confuse the existence of nonprofits with the existence of liberation,” she said. “We sometimes have to go beyond that in order to do the things that we want to do.”

According to her, government assistance for low-income Americans is at risk of funding cuts due to the current political climate. She highlighted that the work of nonprofits is now more important than ever, but also more difficult to achieve. However, she is a firm believer in the necessity of this assistance for those in need, especially when it comes to food assistance. 

“Stigmatizing discourse is often used to demonize people who use welfare and who use food systems and we need to push back against that story and that language and tell our own stories about hunger,” de Souza said.

De Souza said many people see poverty as a “personal and moral failure, not a deep-rooted systemic problem” and believe that people in such a position are “lazy, fraudulent, or criminal,” which creates the stigma and stereotypes about them. 

During her workshop, “Beyond Charity: Building Dignity, Belonging, and Justice in Food Assistance Spaces,” attendees explored common stereotypes about food pantry users, including harmful narratives aimed at women with large families and communities of color. It focused on both the harm these ideas create and practical ways for food pantry workers to challenge them on the job.

“The workshop was so well received and I have had so many requests for sharing, that I am going to find a place to publish it, hopefully open access,” de Souza said.

For de Souza, the biggest highlight of the conference was seeing how much the community appreciates her work, which she says is a feeling teachers and researchers don’t often experience.

“So many of them had my book, ‘Feeding the Other,’ and called it their manual for doing food pantry work. I had no idea!” she said.

She experienced a full-circle moment after discovering the other keynote speaker was University of Massachusetts Professor Mariana Chilton, who inspired de Souza to pursue her line of research. Another touching moment came when a young woman approached de Souza and told her she had been a guest speaker at the woman’s university in 2019, which ultimately inspired her to pursue the same line of research.

​​”It was pretty incredible,” she continued.
”It's very rare that we get to see our work taken up in such a deep way, and helpful in practical ways in people's everyday lives.”