Meet Didi, Taz, Sarah, and Alison, the four Latina women in the Bronx behind The Fridge Girls whose form of activism is mutual aid—partnering with community fridges, coordinating food pick-ups and drop-offs, and organizing events around the Bronx and Harlem to ensure that everybody eats. (This Thanksgiving alone, they delivered 688 turkeys to neighbors, NBD.)
A community fridge is exactly what it sounds like: A fridge, often positioned on the sidewalk and accessible to anyone, that’s filled with produce, prepared foods, or packaged goods, with its contents available for the taking, no strings attached. And if you hadn’t heard of the concept before 2020, you weren’t alone; when The Fridge Girls started this past summer, there were just a handful of community fridges in New York City.
While food insecurity is, unfortunately, not new, Covid pushed it to an extreme—with places like the Bronx being hit particularly hard. (According to the Food Bank of New York City, 50% of their food banks and soup kitchens closed due to the pandemic, more than any other borough.) For this foursome, that was unacceptable. So they decided to do what they could to help support their neighbors—tapping into their backgrounds in hospitality to rethink what community support might look like.
Today, The Fridge Girls put the current NYC community fridge tally at 70 (and counting!), but they insist that their work has only just begun.
Rally+Rise chatted with Taz, Didi, and Sarah about mutual aid as activism, avoiding burnout, and making everyone feel okay about taking a Kind Bar from a community fridge.
First things first: How did you meet?
Didi: We all got connected through Black Lives Matter protests. Taz and Sarah went to Fordham University together, and then over the summer they reconnected. Taz had gotten into community fridges and Sarah had a car, so she started giving her pick-ups and drop-offs to the Friendly Fridge. And around the same time I met the other Fridge Girl, Alison, at a protest, and we got involved in the Kingsbridge and Riverdale fridges. At that time, there were five community fridges in the city, and we all ran into one another on more than one occasion and just clicked. Around August, Sarah made a group chat called “The Fridge Girls” and we thought, wouldn’t it be so funny if we did a Fridge Girls account on Instagram? In September we were asked to debut at a block party in Harlem, so we became an official thing out of nowhere. It was very quick how everything came together.
How’d you go from protests to fridges?
Didi: We got into community aid and mutual aid work because we found that to be the most solid foundation—it fuels the movement. You can’t have a revolution if people aren’t fed!
Do you consider mutual aid work to be “activism”?
Taz: I don’t think a lot of people think of [what we do] as activism, because it seems so not-aggressive.
Didi: There’s a connotation of what activism looks like, and we’ve been hesitant to refer to ourselves as activists or community leaders because none of us want to build ourselves up too much. But we’ve become more comfortable with approaching those terms. Existence is resistance, and our presence in a lot of the spaces where we assert ourselves is a statement. A lot of this work is political, because you’re saying: Why is Brooklyn getting a truck of USDA food every day, and not one has gone further north than Harlem?
“Existence is resistance, and our presence in a lot of the spaces where we assert ourselves is a statement.”
Sarah: People view this as charity work, too—so we’re teaching people all the time that this is mutual aid. Because we’re four women born or raised in the Bronx in some capacity, oftentimes that gets us looked at as, oh, they’re cute, the ‘fridge girls.’” We know we’re fighting food insecurity, but we’re not going to solve it. That’s a larger topic of conversation, and it’s not going to be something that will work forever, but it works for right now—and every little bit helps. Every time we’ve done something, people are pleasantly surprised—but the fact that they’re surprised at all, it’s like, you weren’t expecting that?!
How much of your work has been educating people about what a community fridge is—or isn’t?
Sarah: Sometimes we do have to teach people how to take care of the fridge; if you’ve never seen it before, you need some teaching.
Didi: Or destigmatizing people taking food from it. We get a lot of, “I love what you’re doing, but I’m not going to take food.” It’s like, you’re walking down the street, you don’t need a Kind Bar? That’s the mutual aid piece of it; if we’re picking up 48 pounds of leeks, we’re going to take some leeks home. It’s not a charity thing.
Sarah: You don’t want Vermont sharp cheddar? Hello!
Didi: Or some of the most delicious focaccia you’ve ever tasted?!
What do you wish more people understood about mutual aid work?
Taz: It’s a lot easier doing this work if you’re from the community, and I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable going into any other community and feel like I could do this work unless I was invited.
Sarah: You don’t have to be from the community to help any community, but if you’re going to go into a community, don’t teach the community. You need to learn from that community. It’s mutual aid, so you need to learn and receive things as well, and ask them how they run the show.
“You don’t have to be from the community to help any community, but if you’re going to go into a community, don’t teach the community. You need to learn from that community.”
Didi: That’s a huge piece of why it’s so important for someone to be understanding of the space that they’re coming into, especially places with built-in trauma. It’s different going into Bushwick than Kingsbridge in the Bronx, where every single system has been put in place to keep the people down and fuck them over. It’s very different to go there versus somewhere else, because there’s an inherent trauma and distrust from people who grew up in these communities where we come from; you don’t trust certain things, you approach things with caution, and that could be read as hostile. That’s a trauma response. You can come into a space wanting to do good, but you’re not always going to be received well.
Sarah: We’ve watched our communities be last for so many things. I live in Throgs Neck in the Bronx, which is way more suburban, and every time I go to my grandma’s house we have to shovel because [the city] never brings plows there. We’ve watched our communities be left last or forgotten, so to Didi’s point: Of course you’re not going to trust people going into the community, because for years and years promises have fallen through. Something with no strings attached? I don’t even know what that means. So it’s been a lot easier to trust people who get where we’re coming from.
Let’s talk about activist burnout: How do you balance this with work, friends, family, etc.?
Didi: I worked in theater, so I’ve been unemployed since the very beginning of the pandemic. For a good while I was doing this work six days a week for insanely long hours, until they were like, “Wait, have you had water today?!” So then slowly I started to pull back, because it does wear you down. We had to set a lot of boundaries.
Sarah: In an ideal world, this would be a passion project that we’re not doing full-time. I’m a full-time teacher and I try really hard to set boundaries and do this after-school or on the side. But when we have events and it’s three to four of us doing everything, that’s just not possible. It has been really difficult to balance, and I don’t think we’ve always done the best job; we’re trying to figure it out as we grow. Our hearts are in it, so it’s really hard to set a line and delineate.
“It has been really difficult to balance, and I don’t think we’ve always done the best job; we’re trying to figure it out as we grow.”
Didi: In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be doing this at all! And it would be great if this country recognized the work being done by all of these people as valuable and worth compensation. It doesn’t pay any bills, it doesn’t offer any feeling of safety or security.
Sarah: This is a public service. Here in America, we don’t really appreciate it. [We’re told that] charity and volunteerism are things you do to make yourself feel good, but there’s no reason why people shouldn’t be getting paid to do this work.
What’s next for The Fridge Girls?
Taz: As much as we love the community fridges, there’s so much more to be done.
Sarah: We believe that access to good, healthy food is a human right. We don’t want to put ourselves in a box. “Everybody eats” is a phrase we’ve heard a lot in our communities, so it’s fitting for what we do because, yes, we still put food in fridges and are liaisons for fridges, but “everybody eats” encompasses so many other things. And everybody has a seat at our table.
“at the end of the day, the Bronx eats last. So we want to hold our government accountable and help organizations to get the Bronx more, in general.”
Didi: The events that we’ve put together have been huge—Fridgemas, Turkey Day Giveaway. We want to be a resource in a much bigger capacity than just the community fridges, because we realize they’re really important and it’s a cool thing to have, but…
Taz: It’s not reaching everybody. It’s this beautiful thing—dropping food off and people are utilizing it and it’s dope—but realistically, there are only so many people who can eat from that fridge. And at the end of the day, the Bronx eats last. So we want to hold our government accountable and help organizations to get the Bronx more, in general.
Didi: It’s important to support the people we see doing the work. It’s important to continue to be people who have a connection to a resource. People have come to us asking, “How do I do this?” We’re moving towards being an all-encompassing resource or community staple, doing our part in a lot of different arenas.
What's your advice for someone who wants to get involved in mutual aid?
Taz: Think hard about what it is that drives you. Think about something that you grew up seeing. What’s something that angers you? What’s really pissing you off about what’s going on in your community right now? And Instagram is a really good resource—all the protests I went to was through @JusticeForGeorgeNYC on Instagram, for example.
Didi: Starting with a really, really small, localized organization is the best advice I could give someone. No shade to the Red Cross, but it’s just so unapproachable. Find grassroots mutual aid organizations that have the time to engage with you on a personal level. In New York, there are a ton of organizations and community groups like us that are just a couple of people coming together. And even reposting stuff is so huge, just getting it out to more eyes—if you don’t feel safe during a pandemic going out and being around other people, that’s so huge.
“Think hard about what it is that drives you. Think about something that you grew up seeing. What’s something that angers you? What’s really pissing you off about what’s going on in your community right now?”
Sarah: There’s no one way to be an activist. You don’t need a car; you can make graphics. Someone hit us up because we were having a Halloween event and she paints faces. Anything can be a form of protest!
Visit thefridgegirls.com to learn more about The Fridge Girls and how you can support their work.