'A fool's errand'?:A critical reparative perspective on labour, care, and advocacy in the charitable food aid system

As charitable and community food aid expands amid deepening inequality, the experiences of frontline workers and volunteers remain underexplored. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography across six countries in North America and Western Europe, this paper centres those working and volunteering in food charity to examine the invisible labour, moral injury, and emotional contradictions of food aid, where care and solidarity coexist with complicity in systemic failure. Low-paid staff and unpaid volunteers sustain market-driven models while navigating their own precarity. Using a critical reparative lens, the paper reframes moral injury as a terrain through which frontline actors negotiate the tensions between care, complicity, and repair. In doing so, it advances a comparative and reparative approach that brings moral injury into dialogue with feminist ethics of care, showing how frontline actors negotiate the tensions between complicity and care to create radical possibilities for solidarity and repair within systems designed to sustain inequality.