Challenging the 'reticent' state? Grassroots organizations, COVID-19 and the local government.

As pointed out by some scholars, the public response to homelessness and poverty changed dramatically with the pandemic (Parsell et al., 2020) as public stakeholders decided to spend additional fundings for homelessness and poverty policies. However, these interventions were often thought of as a means to reduce the threat to the health of the non-homeless population (Parsell et al., 2020) and were led by local governments which remain reluctant to provide the necessary resources for ending homelessness (Evans et al., 2021). As these public interventions were insufficient and took a long time to be implemented, grassroots organizations were often at the forefront of the crisis for providing resources to the most marginalized people. Drawing on this basis, this paper aims at understanding the role taken by a grassroots organization in Rennes (a medium-sized city in France) during the pandemic. I focus on a local grassroots organization which worked independently of the state and developed informal practices to deliver food to people experiencing homelessness and food insecure households. In this perspective, they managed to compete with professional and state-funded service providers and the pandemic shed light on the efficiency of their practices, based on unconditionality and empowerment. Through observant participation and interviews with the grassroots organization's managers, volunteers and public stakeholders, I argue that, during the pandemic, this grassroots organization was not only a "buffer to state absence and neglect" (De Verteuil, 2017, p.1518), but it also managed to put forward some of their claims, hence challenging the "reticent state" (Evans et al., 2021) and steering public policies into more compassionate ways to address food insecurity. • Coeurs Résistants , a grassroots organization located in Rennes (France), managed to subvert neoliberal welfare practices based on imposing access conditions, by itself providing food without conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. • The crisis was an opportunity for this organization to influence the municipal government and local stakeholders to move away from national government requirements, for promoting unconditionality in food provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]