Connecting the Prosocial Action Mosaic: an Identity Lens on Student Food Insecurity

A longitudinal field study of 11 on-campus food pantries and their founders allowed us to investigate what we label the “Prosocial Action Matrix” that interconnects the various forms of prosocial action that coalesce around an emerging social issue—in this case, student food insecurity. We discovered that the connection between the social movements that shape who founders are outside of work and who they seek to be through their prosocial venturing is strongly shaped by the nature of the broader role through which they are attached to a university bureaucracy. This has powerful implications for how founders enact the social issue, for continued activism as founders, and for how their strategies envision the social identities of beneficiaries and the social construction of stigma. The theory and process model we develop broaden and enrich Founder Identity Theory and provide a platform for research that better comprehends how various overlapping forms of organizing importantly shape the context of prosocial venturing.