Exploring Social Support Actions as Alternative Forms of Resilience in a Greek Urban Community

Since 2008 Greece has faced an unprecedented economic crisis with multifaceted impacts on individuals’ lives. In response to the crisis alternative forms of resilience have been developed including individual and collective economic and non-economic activities that target to counterbalance recession’s detrimental consequences. The main rationale of the mixed method study is to explore a specific form of collective responses including instrumental social support actions (e.g., soup kitchens, free distribution of clothes and other material staff, free medical care and medicines etc) to socio-economically deprived individuals in a Greek urban community, i.e. Chania. The quantitative part of the study unveils the escalating trend in social support actions as the recession deepens. The qualitative study sheds light on how social support agents frame such actions as forms of solidarity in the context of the current socio-economic and political Greek crisis.