The term community is used to describe a set of different and often conflicting actors involved in the organization of care.
These can be informal and “bottom-up”, such as a network of extended families caring for a sick family member, neighborhood groups supporting destitute households, or movement initiatives standing in solidarity with battered women. Ηowever, this category also includes professionalized actors, such as urban non-profit companies (NPOs), international or local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work to support people with disabilities or play a central role in the “management” of the refugee issue, but also social economy enterprises, such as social cooperatives for the work integration of people with psychosocial problems (COISPE); to all of this comes to be added the Church and church organizations, which traditionally play an important role in supporting (certain) vulnerable populations.
The community includes radical, informal initiatives that resist the privatization of care and exclusionary logics, up to professional organizations competing in the market for the absorption of state and European funds. But no matter how broadly we define community, the fact is that it too, in turn, comes to fill the care deficit of the state, and this happens—as with the family—at great cost and pressure. Especially in the last decade of crises, the prevalence of neoliberal policies seems to shift responsibility for the organization of care to the so-called “civil society”.
At the same time, no social policy alone, without the local community, can de-institutionalize, integrate, and take care of those in need. And this is because, in times of crisis, when the state is absent and pauperism threatens ever larger parts of the population, communities themselves develop practices of radical solidarity and mutual aid that empower the vulnerable. Such a space of radical communal care was also created in Greece in the last decade, with the emergence of a vast network of solidarity. Social clinics, collective kitchens, markets without mediators, giveaway bazaars, and work collectives managed to show in practice that care (can be) an act of resistance to inequality.