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This paper explores how one neighbourhood revitalization initiative addresses – or fails to address – intersecting systems of oppression as it seeks to facilitate resident-led change. Unlike many similar initiatives, the Neighbourhood Action Strategy in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has an explicit focus on grassroots community development and resident leadership, and actors within the strategy have paid significant attention to issues of inclusion. We draw on in-depth interviews with City staff, local service providers, and neighbourhood residents, as well as on observation of neighbourhood meetings and media analysis, to explore how diversity, inclusion, and equity are understood and managed by different actors within the Strategy. We demonstrate that despite a stated mandate of inclusion, the initiative often struggles to engage significant participation from working-class and racialized people. We argue that this is in part due to complex interpersonal and institutional dynamics informed by race and class, which create significant tensions that ultimately limit the initiative's ability to create meaningful transformation. We conclude with some lessons learned about how to disrupt the racist, classist, and other oppressive discourses that can operate even within the most progressive initiatives.

In the last two decades, emergency food provision (e.g., food banks, meal programmes) has become an increasingly institutionalized form of hunger relief. Critiques of the emergency food system, as articulated by Poppendieck’s 1998 book Sweet Charity?, suggest that such programmes are unable to cope with growing hunger in a meaningful, stable, efficient, or culturally appropriate way, and that they may facilitate government retrenchment. Meanwhile, popular attention has increasingly focused on the environmental and social costs of our globalized industrial food system, and efforts to challenge it (e.g., urban fruit gleaning, chicken rearing) are becoming widespread. These efforts have drawn new kinds of organizations into the world of food (in)security. Drawing on organizational documents and key informant interviews, this paper examines how emergency food provision is changing because of the rise of ‘community food security’ discourse and practice in the period since Sweet Charity? Findings suggest that emergency food providers have responded to critiques in partial and incongruent ways. Organizations face structural constraints that curtail their ability to reorganize, while new kinds of organizations are engaging in community food security projects, both challenging and reinforcing the charity food model in ways that have relevance for progressive (food) organizing more generally.