Expressions of volunteering: between the collective and individual project

Abstract

Volunteering is part of a series of social transformations that marked the “entry” into a new phase of modernity. In this transition both the practice and the organizations that promote it have come to face new challenges associated with above all, the emergence of processes of individualization and reflexivity. Re-food is a relatively recent food aid initiative that has had the capacity to adapt, not only, to a (national) reality characterized by a certain “participatory apathy”, but also to different profiles of volunteers and thus to different expectations and interests. Based on ethnographic research, this article seeks to explain the growth of the initiative and how its volunteers manifest “symptoms” of the aforementioned transition.