Pane Quotidiano - interview

Interfaced
21

Thank you very much, Claudio.

22

And now I expect you one day at Pane Quotidiano.

23

Hi,

Can I have their details, to see what work we can partner on for the refugees in Uganda and the internally displaced people in the eastern region

24

Hi @Adonis2 you can find their contact on their webpage. Their experience on workin locally could be really precious.

If you are open to it, we’d also be very interested to hear more about your experience working with refugees in Uganda and with internally displaced people in the eastern region.
Could you share a bit more here?

25

Hi @Interfaced-ethno1 , thank you for the message and for the connection.

I am originally from the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and have been living in Kampala, Uganda, as a refugee since 2015. My own displacement experience has shaped my commitment to working with refugees and vulnerable communities.

I am the Founder and Executive Director of YAREN Organisation, a refugee-led organization established in 2017 to support refugees and host communities through entrepreneurship training, education, health, and WASH initiatives across Uganda. Through our programs, we have supported over 13,000 people across refugee settlements and urban communities, helping women, youth, and displaced families build livelihoods and resilience.

In addition to working with refugees in Uganda, I have also engaged with communities affected by conflict and displacement in Eastern DRC, focusing on peacebuilding, youth empowerment, and community resilience.

I would be very glad to share more details and explore possible collaboration, but here is a link to learn quickly what is aboutYAREN Orgaization Our facebook pagealso and here is our YouTube link

Empowering-Refugees-Building-Resilient-Communities.pdf (6.9 MB)

youtube link

1 Like
26

Notes for myself and @siri for coding / analysis:

This interview gives us an empirical detailed case of a long-running civic/voluntary institution functioning as essentially a “democratic interface” in Milan informaly, through everyday redistribution infrastructure, volunteer coordination, and it is also an example of “care praxis”. It also shows how COVID acted as a shock catalyst that forced adaptation, raised visibility, and innovated new forms of service (like home delivery for disabled folks), while keeping the org non-partisan / non-institutional.

From a coding perspective, these are the themes that jump out at me on first read

  • Crisis-driven org adaptation / resilience (closure to guests, redistribution via Red Cross/Civil Protection, “no-contact” logistics)

  • Hybrid infrastructure / node (Pane Quotidiano as a node vis a vis other aid systems during emergency, despite lack of formal institutional affilicaitons)

  • Care praxis / affective praxis (food distribution plus “a few seconds of calm”: smiling, listening, care as civic/affective practice)

  • Visibility as resource/amplifier (social media attention increases donations, COVID in a larger sense as “springboard” for attention to food insecurity)

  • Institutional independence/autonomy and what it enables (explicit distance from Region/Municipality/Church funding; reliance on producers, donors, EU food aid)

  • Scale and logistics (numbers are themselves data: 3,500–4,500 guests/day; 1.45 million bags/year; 4,300 liters of milk etc)

  • Services like home delivery – a new “interface” for those excluded from public distribution spaces?

  • Volunteer community formation / social cohesion (post-COVID “constructive harmony,” dinners, relationships going beyond shifts; volunteering as a social infrastructure, all very Durkheimian)

  • Expansion into pedagogy (schools outreach, “solidarity” as teachable practice)

  • Local civic imaginaries of Milan, identity (Milan as “capital of volunteering”; the city narrative: built by people; pride in neighborhood-level micro-participation via chat groups and clean-ups)

One especially interesting element is the interview’s discourse around “participation”: it’s not framed as rights-claims or deliberation, but as maintaining a reliable material safety net at scale combined with recognition. The democratic “interface” is the combination of logistics + trust + repeated small affect-laiden (sometimes) encounters.

Notes for future interviews:

It would be useful to push further on the politics and mechanics of all of this

  • How does Pane Quotidiano decide priorities when there are many competing demands (who gets what, when, and how is fairness perceived/maybe critiqued)

  • How do volunteers manage emotional labor and boundaries?

  • How did relationships with Red Cross/Civil Protection actually work during the handoff phase – logistics, coordination, friction?

Also would like to know more about:

  • The internal governance model: who makes decisions, how volunteer coordination works, and what “improved organization” concretely means?

  • Corporate volunteering: does it change perceptions on either side, is it merely symbolic / perceived as such?

  • The home-delivery service as a new democratic interface? (I don’t know if this is a right directin, Sirin what do you think?)

1 Like