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More than just Food: Field Visits to an Emergency Relief Centre

Published: 07 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Emergency relief centres provide financial, housing, food and other types of support to families and individuals who experience financial hardship. These centres are non-profit, often government supported organizations that rely on the help of their volunteers and social workers. This paper reports on our preliminary findings from field visits to one such centre called Communify, in the inner west of Brisbane, Australia. Communify runs an emergency food relief facility for people who find themselves in a crisis or temporarily unable to afford groceries. Over a period of five months, we did several field visits to the centre and carried out 21 short in-situ interviews, with a mix of Communify clients and volunteers. Our results shed light on people's experiences of financial hardship and their interactions with the emergency relief centre. In particular, issues related to their perceived values and stigmas associated with their experiences are highlighted in our findings. We identify opportunities for design that can empower people struggling with financial hardship.

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  • (2023)Learning from Other Communities: Organising Collective Action in a Grassroots Food-sharing InitiativeComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-023-09468-532:4(951-999)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
  • (2022)Engaging with Under-Resourced Communities for User Research through Self-Authored VideosProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556266:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)“This is not a free supermarket”: Reconsidering Queuing at Food-sharing EventsProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech10.1145/3461564.3461582(319-331)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2021
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    OzCHI '15: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction
    December 2015
    691 pages
    ISBN:9781450336734
    DOI:10.1145/2838739
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 07 December 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. Design
    2. Emergency Relief
    3. Financial Hardship
    4. HCI

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    • Refereed limited

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    OzCHI '15

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    OzCHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 47 of 97 submissions, 48%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Learning from Other Communities: Organising Collective Action in a Grassroots Food-sharing InitiativeComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-023-09468-532:4(951-999)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Engaging with Under-Resourced Communities for User Research through Self-Authored VideosProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556266:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2021)“This is not a free supermarket”: Reconsidering Queuing at Food-sharing EventsProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech10.1145/3461564.3461582(319-331)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2021
    • (2021)Queuing for Waste: Sociotechnical Interactions within a Food Sharing CommunityProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445059(1-15)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2020)Voices of the Social SectorACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/336836827:2(1-26)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2020
    • (2017)Everyday ResilienceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31347401:CSCW(1-21)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
    • (2016)Using self-reported experiences to explore the issues of women in crisis situationsProceedings of the 28th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3010915.3010962(483-488)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2016
    • (2016)Vulnerability of displacementProceedings of the 28th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3010915.3010948(125-134)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2016
    • (2016)Building connectionsProceedings of the 14th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Interactive Exhibitions, Workshops - Volume 210.1145/2948076.2948091(1-4)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2016
    • (2016)AccountableProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858301(1620-1631)Online publication date: 7-May-2016

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