Building communication infrastructure from below: solidarity outpatient clinics and community resilience in times of crisis

When healthcare systems strain under overlapping crises, informal organizations often emerge to fill critical gaps. Yet communication scholarship has given limited attention to how these crisis-born groups build the communicative infrastructure that sustains their operations. Using communication infrastructure theory (CIT), we analyze solidarity outpatient clinics (SOCs) in Greece, grassroots health organizations that arose amid economic austerity, the refugee crisis, and COVID-19. Through a multi-level, multimethod case study of one prominent SOC from 2011 to 2021, drawing on 20 interviews, 50 radio broadcasts, and 29 bulletins, we examine how it integrated into storytelling systems, how solidarity shaped its strategies, and what communication action context factors influenced its operations. Findings show the clinic built communication infrastructure from below through relational solidarity, transparency, and media engagement, transforming solidarity into a communicative mechanism while also producing vulnerabilities as conditions stabilized. This extends CIT by shifting the unit of analysis from individuals to informal organizations.