The ethnographic survey establishes that weekly food distributions represent 44 hours of voluntary work per week, or nearly 2,300 hours per year. If this work were carried out as a salaried activity, and considering the average salary in the territorial civil service, this would be equivalent to €42,000 in salary per year. This voluntary work provides each beneficiary with €104 in gross value of goods per year. Combining work and expenses, this represents €257 per year. Monthly parcel distributions for families in difficulty require, in advance, carrying out approximately five collections per year in shopping centres in order to collect donations in kind, supplemented by purchases of fresh produce made on the day of distribution, thanks to cash donations made to the association by individuals. A monthly distribution requires 76 hours of work, or 913 hours per year, or the equivalent of €17,000 in paid work. This work provides each family with €840 of gross value of goods per year, and a total value of €1,872 per year. These two activities (food and parcel distribution) combined represent nearly € 59,000 of salary in the territorial civil service.
The ethnoaccounting approach has afghanistan phone number list made it possible to highlight what counts collectively in the context of charitable activity, and to go beyond the purely accounting reason imposed by the work of expertise. The observation of practices and the interviews have led us to understand that what counts can be subdivided into three questions: how to give ? what to give ? and to whom to give ?
We have observed that the first two questions give rise to more or less direct tensions between individual and collective arbitrations.
In the case of how to give , volunteers are forced to make quick decisions in the course of action, during distributions, and the question " should we give two dishes to a beneficiary who asks for it ? " often arises, with disagreements between volunteers.
The question of what to give (the composition of the dish, the decision to offer a can of sugary drink, etc.) raises questions of arbitration which are, for their part, generally settled by the office without this leading to major debates with the volunteers.
One question, however, does not pose any problem: to whom to give seems obvious to the members of the association, for whom this question is settled upstream by individual socializations. Since it is, according to them, a question of " giving back to society what it has given us ", namely a job, a roof, and the means to provide for one's family, all consider that one must give universally, without distinction, to any person in need.
In a collaborative research approach, we discussed these results (accounting and ethnoaccounting) during a restitution evening with the Elancoeur association . We can only hope that the expert report will actually allow Elancoeur to receive public subsidies that seemed, until then, unattainable to them.