Ordinary Magic in Emergency Assistance Response: How Vermont Everyone Eats Created Conditions for Vermonters' Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Traditional models for feeding programs often rely on charitable models, with food banks collecting food and resources and distributing it directly to individuals who qualify for food assistance. While these programs are valuable, they are not without fault. Some scholars have argued that traditional feeding programs do not address the social and economic cause of hunger and poverty (De Souza, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted just about every part of social life, including hunger, community economics, and feeding programs (Haldane et al., 2021). This disruption created an opportunity to reimage ways to organize feeding programing.Vermont Everyone Eats, VEE was a unique and effective approach to emergency feeding programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. VEE organizing offered an alternative way to think about resilience and feeding programing. VEE offered valuable insights into innovative functions that disrupt traditional emergency feeding programs such as significantly reducing the barrier to enter and requiring local sourcing for meals. VEE is a case of resilience as ordinary magic, a theoretical concept that describes the mundane actions of individuals creating positive assets while simultaneously mitigating risks (Masten, 2014). Drawing on interviews with 32 VEE leaders, I argue that VEE’s model did not completely transform the social and economic systems that surrounded hunger during the pandemic. Rather, in most cases, it drew on and reorganized pre-existing, everyday relationships and resources to launch and deliver extraordinary results. Seeger et al. (2024) argued that more research is needed to examine how systems and communities react to the pandemic and how resilience is experienced in these contexts. I seek to contribute to resilience theorizing by highlighting how resilience as ordinary can be seen in the intentional practices and resources allocated to promote positive normative functions that create patterns of ordinary magic. Specifically, I found that (1) VEE leadership intentionally designed and implemented a successful program that drew on and created opportunities for resilience, (2) resilience as ordinary magic helps explain the success of the program, and (3) resilience and ordinary magic and intrinsically intertwined. These findings further the understanding of resilience and its relation to ordinary magic as well as how emergency response programming can create conditions for resilience and ordinary magic.