Project Narrative

NYC Community Fridge Archive preserves the histories of local community fridges installed in New York City facing food insecurity during the COVID-19 crisis. This project was created with the goal of building a comprehensive historical record of solidarity fridges, as an example of community mutual aid initiatives during the pandemic. As a public archive it will provide primary sources to future academics and the public about the communal response to the pandemic, food security, infrastructure, and any themes that historical distance might reveal. The archival materials and oral histories collected by NYCCFA highlight the voices of the community that built around community fridges during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing a space where participants can share their perspective and experiences directly. This direct access and open space ensure the representation and preservation of the diversity of community fridge communities. It serves as an antidote to media narratives which during the pandemic have focused narrowly on the role of the anarchist collective that started the first community fridge. The archive also promotes the community fridges as an accessible source of information for the public.

Community fridges originated as a way to combat food waste. Reflecting the need of many communities around the world, these fridges have become a source of mutual aid for communities helping each other. In February 2020, an anarchist community A New World in Our Hearts initiated the use of a community fridge to share New York City’s extra food with those in need. Many local communities across the city, after that model, have implemented their own fridges (amounting to over 120 in the New York metropolitan area as of May 2021) to provide fresh, free food to their communities amidst the pandemic inflicted food scarcity. Beyond food, these fridges have been providing places for locals to come together and heal through literary and artistic activities in enduring communities they have organized. We see this community-based practice around NYC community fridges as a new form of activism arising in the city and our digital archive thus strives to collect and represent visual, oral, and otherwise textual histories of that resistance.

 Our project is first and foremost to assist precarious local communities in preserving their histories and to create a playbook for building a community around food security. To do so, our archive will emphasize relationships between people that form a collaborative structure of a digital humanities project. With that goal, we used the open-source platform Omeka which can display an interactive map to each fridge’s information. Our website serves both as an archive and an ongoing platform to further support solidarities and memories surrounding NYC community fridges.

Community fridges continue to grow in number and attract more attention, but there are no public efforts (in NYC) to build an archive or an oral history project similar to the Community Fridge Archive. Through our outreach efforts, we learned about the Organizing Resource Library, a free and fully accessible digital library and an archive of mutual-aid organizing tools —created for, by, and in collaboration with mutual aid organizers across New York City. We have established a relationship with the Organizing Resource Library in the Spring of 2021 and we plan on joining their meetings and collaborating more after the end of the semester. Our search for projects similar or related to the Community Fridge Archive will continue as the archive grows. 

Audience

The primary audience for the NYC Community Fridge Archive are the communities that have been built and growing around the fridges. These communities include the people who use the fridges; the organizers, activists, and volunteers that stock and maintain them; and the restaurants and business owners that donate food, electricity, and/or other kinds of services and materials. The NYC Community Fridge Archive is a way for them to showcase their collaborative work for community building and preserve their memories from that process. The strength of this audience is that these communities are already built, active, and dedicated to community fridges. Their passion for their projects and the community has already been demonstrated by a large number of contributions that have already been sent to the archive. 

One of the challenges for the project ahead is to ensure easy access to the archive and participation from members of these communities who are not often reachable or active on social media. One important limitation to consider is that not all of the people who use and maintain community fridges have a high-speed internet connection or powerful computers. To facilitate the participation of these communities, the archive can be accessed via smartphones. Another limitation for community participation is that, for many fridge users and volunteers, English is a second or third language; in the future, the archive will solicit community help to allow contributions in any language, and possibly create a version of the archive in Spanish, which is the second most spoken language in NYC. This language diversity will also serve as a way to involve the community, creating a new space for collaboration and helping to ensure the longevity of the archive. 

The second target audience is the ecosystem of local nonprofit organizations in New York City. Nonprofits would benefit from a comprehensive map of community fridges, to share the information with people in need and point them out to resources in their neighborhood. The advantage of this audience is that they already have a mission to help people; this, combined with the fact that nonprofits already have a community they serve, makes them the right partners to promote the NYC Community Fridge Archive. 

The public nature of the archive will also be a ready source for future historians and will encourage the NYC population at large to research the historical importance of the unprecedented moment of Covid-19. As a historical document for future research, this archive presents a tremendous resource for historians and other academics to study the Covid-19 crisis, the social infrastructure around the pandemic, and the community fridges in particular. The NYC Community Fridge Archive will serve as a repository of an important moment of communal challenges and resilience in NYC history, and it could help other people start their own mutual aid initiatives in their neighborhood. Moreover, the archive could be used by educators to teach about local history and involve students in contributing to the repository and conducting oral history projects.

To this end, our research and outreach campaigns focused on the communities that built these fridges. The community fridge network (local and global) is a completely grassroots effort, so we took advantage of this ‘openness’ and inserted ourselves directly into the fridge communication channels while labeling ourselves as grad students. While positioning ourselves as students was effective and safe, it didn’t make us appear urgent in our request for their contributions to the archive. On multiple occasions, our audience expressed to us that they were a busy population which made us create as brief and direct communications as possible both over Email and social media direct messages. We were also advised to speak with real fridge organizers early on in the semester to discuss their needs before we built the archive. 

This outreach mostly took place during the month of March, and at that time we learned that it is possible that we might not gain much attention for the reasons that not everyone likes academics and not everyone wants their memories to be preserved digitally. (Even worse, it was possible that we are thought to be just another mapping project of community fridges!) We had also discovered that many fridge users or ‘grocers’ might be undocumented immigrants and other sensitive populations so we thought that it might not be so wise to share the images of fridge users on our social media profile or to feature them in our archive at all. For the most part, we avoided spotlighting any grocers in our outreach campaign and focused instead on the information that was already publicly available. We left it entirely in the fridge communities’ hands to identify themself as we came to understand their values of privacy. The NYC fridge community is an extremely strong group of people who seem to go above and beyond to feed the hungry of NYC and beyond, but most of them also protect their grocers’ identities. (Please note that this is not the case for all fridges, but for most.) 

Project Activities

1. Overview  (Elena and Lola) 

In terms of project management, the NYC Community Fridge Archive team was able to accomplish nearly all of the goals we had set in our Work Plan. The only component we had to leave out was Phase 3 of our Outreach Plan: we had planned to have one community initiative a month, such as a Photo contribution campaign on social media for March, and a yoga lesson that would serve as a fundraiser for April. Our Launch party and Collaborators Appreciation Day was initially planned for May, but the team decided to move it to Sunday, June 6th to focus on our finals, wait for CDC guidelines about outdoor meetups, and to avoid Memorial Day Weekend.

As mentioned above, we were able to achieve the goals we had set for the project. However, this does not mean that we achieved them in the order or in the timeline we had initially envisioned. The first phase of the project was much slower than we thought, and the final phase happened much faster.

To elaborate more on this, Phase 1 of Outreach was Community Outreach: creating relationships with community fridge organizers, volunteers, donors, and grocers and meeting with them on Zoom to learn what affordances and functionalities they would like to see in our archive. We managed to meet with organizers and volunteers from five main community fridges or groups of fridges:

•     Fort Greene Community Fridge (Brooklyn)
•     Astoria Community Fridge (Queens)
•     South Bronx Mutual Aid (Bronx). This organization manages the Anchor Fridge, the Isla Fridge, the Nuestra Nevera fridge, and Da Peoples Pantry.
•     North Brooklyn Fridges (Brooklyn). Organized by North Bronx Mutual Aid, they manage the Greenpoint Fridge and the Cooper Park Fridge
•     Forest Ave COMEunity Fridge (Staten Island)

During our meetings with the fridge community, we were able to talk about our project, its main goals, and the affordances of Omeka. Then, we asked the organizers and volunteers if this project could be relevant and/or helpful for them, what features they would like to see in our archive, and if we could thank them by organizing fundraising events for them. These conversations brought our project into the community, gave us a realistic perspective on its inner workings, and led us to discoveries we hadn’t considered at the beginning.

Our first discovery was that all of the fridges organizers while thanking us for the thought, told us that they didn’t need money or fundraisers. This is because most of them are already well-established within their local community, and they receive enough donations to defray the expenses of fridge cleaning products, repairs, and foods if there is a lull in donations from grocery stores and delis. Moreover, most of these fridges are managed by individuals, oftentimes from their personal bank or Venmo accounts that have been dedicated to their community fridge. This means that they cannot go above a certain amount of donations for fear of incurring taxes and bureaucratic headaches. Learning that the fridge organizers didn’t want us to fundraise for them meant that we made a collective decision to not hold community events of this kind – hence the cancellation of part of our Outreach plan.

The second thing we discovered is that beneath the joyful surface we see on social media and the press, community fridges experience challenges, vandalism, and conflicts with other mutual aid organizers due to disagreements on how to conduct their operations. This last discovery was the most problematic to us: one of the fridge organizers revealed that organizers from another fridge in the same areas were sexually harassing her female volunteers, fundraising in their name and keeping the money, alienating them from their donors, and vandalizing their fridges by filling them with non-allowed items such as unpackaged meat, spoiled vegetables (both of which are a health hazard), and unlabeled food (which could cause allergic reactions). Moreover, we learned that the members of an anarchist organization, which has had a lot of visibility on social media, online media, and the community fridges chats, had been manipulating people, gaslighting who dared to speak up about these issues, and harassing them into silence. After this conversation, the team was in a state of shock, and we all felt very naive for not predicting the complexity of the issues that come with a large, decentralized movement where people might have conflicting ideas about what mutual aid is (and, sometimes, not the best intentions). 

In the general meeting following this conversation, the NYC Community Fridge Archive team decided on a series of resolutions:

1.   As an archive that aims to represent all the fridges, we would not erase the bad actors from our database. However, we decided not to engage with these people in our outreach efforts and not to feature them on our social media channels: we did not want to give more visibility to organizations and individuals who had demonstrated abusive behavior in an otherwise caring and hardworking community.
2.   Following our commitment to represent the authentic stories of the NYC community fridges, the team agreed that the Archive needed to be a platform where organizers, volunteers, grocers, and donors could share not only their good memories but also their challenges and their frustrations. On social media, the tone that fridges use needs to be positive and uplifting because they need to promote their initiatives; however, this prevents them from telling the whole story. The team decided to provide the fridge community with space where they could tell their stories in their own voice, without shying away from the ugliness, the challenges, and the internal issues they face if they decide to do so. We would not be guilty of sugarcoating or whitewashing.
3.   Finally, pursuant to the feminist ethics of care that guides our work, the team members decided to look inward and practice self-care in the aftermath of this difficult conversation. We started to check in on each other to make sure we were all ok and safe, since dealing with these issues of harassment and abuse had been triggering for some of us.

As it was mentioned above, the final part of the project went much faster than we had envisioned. We were worried that not enough people would contribute to the archive and that it would look like an empty shelf, or better, an empty fridge. However, after our first contribution – a photograph of the Chelsea Fridge which was uploaded on April 19, 2021 – the community started warming up to the idea of having an archive where they could share their stories. As of May 14, 2021, we have received 57 contributed items: most of them are photos of fridges, artwork, and volunteers, but we also have audio recordings of people’s memories, flyers, magnet designs, a mission statement, and a press release.

2. Outreach (Allison) 

When we first created the NYC Community Fridge Archive’s social media profiles (especially, the Instagram account), the last thing that any of us expected was the backlash. To elaborate on this issue, as early as mid-February we began following, liking, and commenting on other fridge Instagram posts while not having our own social media account with content; nor have we built up our Omeka website yet. We later found out from one of the fridge organizers that this gave the greater fridge community the wrong impression of us! We were thought of as being associated with In Our Hearts and even worse some folks suspected that we were the Mott Haven Fridge basically posing as a catfish. Luckily, we found this out pretty early on (as mentioned above), which forced our hand in mostly slowing down our Instagram outreach strategy. On the flip side of things, at least we got noticed! Regardless, this made us pause on engaging with fridges using social media until we had a better grasp on what the fridge community actually needed, so most of the Instagram posts are dated from late March to early May. This also created more of a focus of our team using email as the first and primary point of professional contact as much as we could and opted to not include much of our personal contact information within email communication to respect all of our privacy. The impact of our fridge being misunderstood also forced us to change the language that we were using to be more inclusive and to state that we have no involvement with any anarchist organization.

As time and outreach went on, we learned that fridge organizers are very busy and that they might not have a lot of time to focus on their emails with us and contribute to the archive. This encouraged us to tighten up our email campaign to be short and friendly and to create more social media posts that were thoughtfully planned (fridge cuisine types, celebrating specific fridges and artists). We tagged individual fridges, artists, and volunteers in our posts, which was effective in engaging the community in a holistic way. We also decided to go out into the public and meet the literal fridges themselves, which had not been in our original outreach plan. Luckily, we were able to catch some fridge organizers and volunteers in person on several occasions and inform them about the archive. We were also able to capture special moments of real people donating to the fridges which served as great social media posts and helped us gain trust from the fridge community. We were mostly met with enthusiasm and interest from our interactions, but only one of these in-person meetings (the East Village Neighbors fridge) led to a meaningful contribution to the archive. For the fridges that we met with in person, we did give them a little bit more follow-up than the others after our in-person meetings. While it is disappointing that most of these folks did not directly contribute any media to the archive (yet), these conversations were still illuminating and impacted our project in a positive way.

3. Our Web Pages (Montage)  

There were two products designed for the archive: 

• Homebase page at the CUNY Commons for presenting the project 
• the archive website built on Reclaim powered by Omeka Classic and OHMS. 

While building the homebase page on the Commons was fairly straightforward, the archive took several turns. First of all, we did not initially have our Reclaim account, so I started building the archive on my personal website. The initial installation was successful. However, several plugins, most critically the Contributions Plugin, which would enable user submissions to the archive, did not install properly. After consultations with the GC Fellow Stefano Morello and several advisors at my hosting site, it became clear that this was a server-side issue. At this point, The Graduate Center made our Reclaim account available to us. On Reclaim, I initially installed Omeka S, which may seem like yet another mishap, but it made even clearer how critical the affordances of Omeka Classic were to our purposes. First of all, while Omeka Classic has a user-friendly interface that presents the contents of the archive in a form similar to a portfolio website, Omeka S has a more classic library catalog interface even on the user side.

Being that our archive is a community-facing website, it was clear that this interface would not serve our purposes of attracting a wide range of audiences. Secondly, Omeka S does not support as many plugins and at the capacity that Omeka Classic does, so we made the switch to Omeka Classic. The technical support we have received from Reclaim regarding backend issues has been of critical importance. Affordances of tools and technical support are important considerations in DH projects as our process also has shown.

In addition to building and installing the archive website and its components, we needed to make decisions regarding organizing our data and selecting its metadata. We held several group meetings to decide how to categorize our data, and how we would adapt the DublinCore Metadata which Omeka utilizes. Even standardized terms or terminology may communicate different things depending on one’s audience, so this proved a bit challenging as we wanted to be as accurate and communicable with our metadata and categorizations as possible. Final feedback from Dr. Bret Maney made it clearer how complex this issue is as he pointed out that the language we used (that which was provided by Omeka) for data categories on our website such as ‘Collections’ and ‘Items’ could be replaced with more user-friendly ones. We plan to therefore replace them in the future, having an archive with a sophisticated organization yet is communicable and user friendly. These are potential contributions to the field of libraries and digital archives as we achieve such functionality.

4. Writing/Editing the Documents (Andy)   

As a writer and editor in the team, I contributed to the project at its various stages by composing and editing the texts that map out the plans and document the progress of our project. In addition, I oversaw the texts that were used in communicating with fridge organizers and grocers to modify possible linguistic or ethical issues. For the accurate documentation of our group work process, I transcribed our team’s meetings (for most of the weeks) and collected responses to the team’s in-class and public presentations. Additionally, I edited the entire text of this final report of this project. 

The work ethic of my writing and editing for this particular project has been in line with the team’s purposes/activities of generating this archive in working with the precarious public in these sensitive times. Rather than being creative or aesthetic with language, I did my best to keep the facts as they are (even the texture and nuance of the conversations) from the team members or our archive contributors and other audiences. However, for the formal documents required in the class, I sorted out our dialogues and drafts to make them clear to the readers (the professor Dr. Bret Maney and the rest of the class members, as well as the GC DH community and beyond).        

Accomplishments 

As mentioned above, two products were designed for the archive:

• homebase page at the CUNY Commons for presenting the project: a simple ‘about’ website that introduces the NYCCFA project, located at https://nyccommunityfridgearchive.commons.gc.cuny.edu 

• the archive website built on Reclaim powered by Omeka Classic and OHMS, located at http://nyccommunityfridgearchive.com/nyccfa/

The archive website is powered by Omeka Classic, which allows for multiple plugins and easy interface navigation for both site administrators and users. Site development and installation required managing the website at the backend and from the admin interface. Because of the easy use of the admin interface, the admin tasks ran smoothly as it was possible to easily figure out functions by following simple tutorials, the information provided on the Omeka Website, or intuitive exploration. Backend issues, which included uploading and configuring files via the CPanel, sometimes were smoothly resolved as I could resort to my own knowledge or search for answers on the web. Where further assistance was needed, Reclaim Hosting has been responsive and helpful regarding any questions about the backend issues. 

The admin interface consists of a dashboard, which allows for viewing and configuring the Items, Collections, Item Types, Tags, Exhibits, Simple Pages, Guest Users, User Profiles, Contributed Items, Map, CSV Import, and OHMS Import – all of which are enabled by plugins. The website appearance and settings can be configured via a menu displayed at the top of the page. Included in the Settings are those for DublinCore Metadata- the metadata element set can be reordered and customized via Settings.

The user end/website has a home page that displays information about the project, a Featured Item, Featured Collection, and Featured Exhibit which rotate on a random basis. Recently Added items also are displayed on this page. Users can sign up for the website via the Register function. A menu allows for navigating across the other sections of the website: 

• Browse Items: all items added or contributed to the archive are displayed here. Clicking on ‘Browse by Tag’ displays a clickable tag cloud from which the user can select. Clicking on ‘Search Items’ displays an advanced search interface that allows for searching via multiple keywords and specific fields. Clicking on ‘Browse Map’ displays all items mapped out on an OpenStreetMap of NYC. 
• Browse Collections: all collections are displayed in either alphabetical (Title) or chronological order (Date Added).
• Browse Exhibits: each exhibit represents a borough, thus clicking on each one displays a map of the fridges in the borough. 
• Contribute an Item: this section allows users to contribute items. A mini-tutorial/guide is displayed, alongside the options for the type of item to contribute. The item types the NYCCFA has made available are Fridge Memory (in text form); Image File; Audio File; and PDF Document. Once the user selects the type of item they want to contribute, a form comes up for each item type selected, that has fields such as title, date, name of the item, and the fridge; the user is given the option to provide their name and affiliation to the fridge, a file upload button, and a map interface to place the item on the map. The users are required to read the Agreement to the Terms and Conditions before they can submit their contribution.
• Map: a map displays all items added or contributed to the archive. The items can be browsed by tag or the keyword form entering keywords or selecting specific fields.
• About: this simple page displays short bios of the NYCCFA team and links to the NYCCFA social media accounts.
• Oral History Gallery: this gallery displays the oral history items imported via OHMS.

The plugins:

Currently, 21 Plugins are installed on the website and we have thus far utilized the Contribution, CSSEditor, Dublin Core Extended, Exhibit Builder, Geolocation, Guest User, Hide Elements, OHMS Import, OHMS Object Plugin, PhillySimpleGallery, Record Relations, Simple Pages, Social Bookmarking, and User Profiles plugins. The plugins are accessible via a menu from the admin end and some of them can be configured after installing. 

Plugins that enabled core functions of NYCCFA include:

• DublinCore Extended: this Plugin “adds the full set of Dublin Core properties to the existing Dublin Core element set”.
• Contribution Plugin: This enables user contributions by providing a form-based interface. Once a user submits a contribution, due to our configuration, the item awaits admin approval. Upon approval, it gets displayed as part of the archive.
• Geolocation Plugin: This enables items to be displayed on a map as configured by the admins.
• OHMS Plugins: the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, developed by the Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, enables transcripts, text level search, and thus advanced discoverability to oral history items. 

Evaluation

Social Media/Instagram

Allison has evaluated the impact of social media and email communications in a few ways. For email, we measured the number of direct email invitations vs total contributions. We tracked this alongside our fridge dataset which resulted in 7/85 fridges making direct contributions as a result of just one email invitation. Only a minimal amount of feedback was received in our email communications, and most of that was collected in our first wave of outreach, which was an invitation to meet with us privately to discuss the design and features of the archive. After most of the data were collected on the fridges by Lola, it became clear that Instagram was where most of the fridge contacts welcomed external inquiries, as many of them (the exact number is unknown) do not provide email contact information publicly. It was a little bit more difficult to track the impact of Instagram when it comes to direct contributions versus outgoing messages sent for several reasons. First, the limitations of Instagram involve a character limit on the amount of text that you can send, so even though we shortened our invitation to contribute we decided it was still a bit too long for the context of a direct message. Therefore, most of our dialogue over Instagram consisted of the archive messaging fridges that did not have an email listed as a form of contact with a brief introduction of the project and a solicitation for their email address. On estimate, ~16/30 fridges responded to us with their email address and subsequently were sent the long-form communication. Unfortunately, most of this did not bear fruit in the form of any contribution. We experimented a little bit and offered the link to the archive in some of our messages, but our observation was that if the message was too long it usually went unanswered. While Allison did not make it a point to track all of the outreach that was done on Instagram in the same way it was done with email and our ‘second point’ of contact strategy was dismissed due to time constraints, we specifically used Instagram for its more unique engagement features that included tagging fridges in stories, posts, and comments as an attempt to get their attention.

Liking posts and tagging fridges in stories were the most ineffective method of outreach as many were tagged and liked and very few replied or reposted (the number was not tracked, but it was extremely low). There were some specific social media posts that impacted the number of contributions, the main one being the “Fridge Art Show” series (please see the screenshots below) which was a slideshow that featured over a dozen of the artists who used a fridge as their canvas. The feedback on these posts were words of gratitude, excitement for the archive, and even requests for more posts like that. The reason why these posts were successful was that we tagged artists directly in them and even included some of the artists’ original stories in the text of these posts. One of the best results of this outreach strategy came in the form of an error in providing the appropriate credit to some of the artists, which really got the attention of some of the fridges who were supposed to be featured in this post. The good news is that we fixed the post and they will likely become a heavy contributor to the archive due to their involvement with several fridges.

Overall, most fridges are quite warm and welcome engagement on Instagram and many do love to see themselves featured on our social media pages. Many fridges will simply ‘follow back’ if they see that you are promoting mutual aid efforts and especially if you tag them in a static post that is well done. Our main observation on feedback from social media interactions was that fridges absolutely require multiple points of contact and follow-up reminders in order to be effective contributors. As we understand that fridge organizers and volunteers are quite busy, there needs to be more incentive to contribute to something that might not benefit them in an immediate sense. We were asked questions by fridge organizers about what the incentive exactly was for them to contribute, if any of us had at least visited or volunteered with the fridges in the past, and if we wanted to meet in person on some occasions, as to which for these things we had a limited way of answering those specific questions. 

Media Coverage

At the beginning of the project, Elena Abou Mrad appeared on an episode of the podcast Mixing it Up with Maggi by PinkLeo Productions, a multimedia production company owned by Maggi Delgado, a fellow MA student in Digital Humanities at CUNY. The episode Catching Up with Our Food – Elena (Season 5, Episode 3) is the one with the highest number of listeners – 97 as of May 15, 2021.

Feedback from the Fridge Community

While we will wait until after the end of the semester for a more detailed analysis of the impact of our archive, this is some of the feedback we have gotten so far.

Fridge organizers and volunteers have said that the archive reminds them that they are part of a larger community. They also think that it provides a map both for people in need and for people who might want to help locally. (Plus, one fridge organizer attended our DH showcase event to express their support for NYCCFA; that proved that some of the fridge organizers genuinely felt connected to what we are doing in this public-facing archival project for their community.) 

The NYCCFA Oral History Project, developed by Elena Abou Mrad together with fellow DH students Emily Maanum and Emily Pagano over the course of the semester, allowed us to record interviews that could provide deeper insights on community fridges. As of May 15, 2021, the Oral History team has recorded 5 interviews with Community Fridge organizers and volunteers from around the city. Three of these interviews have been indexed, meaning that they will be available in a format that allows users to navigate the audio recording by chapters and search for keywords. The interviews are available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/nyccommunityfridgearchive.

The oral history project allowed NYCCFA to get even closer to the fridge community by recording and preserving their stories. Below is some of the feedback that organizers Ariadna Phillips (whose audio recording you see indexed above) and Diane Hatz gave us at the end or after their oral history interviews:

“The community fridge archive has meant sharing an honest legacy for my son, fellow organizers, and community given my experience in this work. It has been beautiful and messy and painful and frustrating and uplifting and heartwarming to do this work over the last many months. I’m humbled and grateful that the archive wants to hear our experiences. I’m appreciative of the archive for offering a way to share our artifacts and preserve our history.”

(Ariadna Phillips, South Bronx Mutual Aid)

“Thank you for doing this. (…) I think it’s great that you are taking this on because you know what? When you’re in the midst of something, a lot of people don’t think about documenting it for historical purposes. So thank you, because you are part of the movement by doing this. You are!”

(Diane Hatz, East Village Neighbors Fridge)

Continuation/Future of the Project/Sustainability

After the end of the semester, Founder and Project Manager Elena Abou Mrad will be in charge of the NYC Community Fridge Archive. Her basic work will consist of:

•     Monitoring incoming contributions, approving them, and assigning each item to a collection.
•     Offering technical support to people who have questions on how to contribute and troubleshooting in case they are having issues with the plugin.
•     Periodically checking social media and the community fridge maps to see if there is any fridge to add or information that needs to be updated.
•     Collecting feedback on the archive from the fridge community and working with them to improve the user experience on the site.

Apart from these tasks, Elena will continue establishing relationships with the local fridge community and reaching out to potential contributors via email and social media. She will also apply for grants in order to obtain funding that will be reinvested in the project. This would allow the NYC Community Fridge Archive to:

1.   Afford more server space, which will allow more people to contribute for a longer period of time.
2.   Renew our subscription to Reclaim Hosting or transition to another hosting service in the future.
3.   Pay for a SoundCloud Pro Unlimited account: this will expand the Oral History project to record more interviews. The Basic Plan on Soundcloud only allows for 180 minutes of audio recording, which limits the capabilities of the Oral History project.
4.   Pay for a Canva Pro subscription. Canva is the graphic design platform that we have used to create all of our social media posts. Our audience responded well to the content that we created on Canva, which allowed us to create aesthetically pleasing visuals with a mix of text, images, and other graphics. The Basic subscription is quite limited and does not allow users to download the visuals they create or to share them directly on Instagram and Facebook: A Pro subscription would ensure the possibility to create captivating content that is consistent with the style that we have followed so far on the NYCCFA social media.
5.   Create merch such as stickers, fridge magnets, and tote bags to be distributed among community fridges around the city. This would generate a stronger sense of belonging to a larger community and encourage more people (including grocers) to contribute to the archive. Moreover, tote bags are in high demand at community fridges, since grocers need them to carry their food home: by providing branded canvas bags, the NYCCFA would promote its activities while offering a useful and environmentally-friendly object to community members.
6. Utilize our press release (that Andy has composed) for future press contacts and publications. 

Additionally, Allison will retain access (even while eventually ceasing to continue communications with fridges through Email, Facebook, and Instagram) and will periodically continue to engage on the Instagram account in the form of ‘likes’ and encouraging comments throughout the Summer of 2021. This is in the effort to keep the archive fresh in people’s minds and to aid with encouraging more contributions since we’ve recently just begun! Allison will also continue to refer to themselves as a student who co-developed the archive as part of the CUNY Graduate Center, mostly as a point of reference while networking with the fridge community but also to point to our accomplishments for future academic and community service endeavors. Allison plans to volunteer with several local Brooklyn fridges in the Summer of 2021 as a way to give directly back to the community that they’ve asked a lot from. Allison will aim to always act as a resource to Elena about any fridge communications that may occur either in person or electronically, especially if any interactions should require her attention and benefit the NYC Community Archive as a whole.

Finally, we believe that the NYC Community Fridge Archive will serve an important pedagogical function. As the photograph “PS131 visit the KWT Fridge (April 2021)” shows, New York teachers have recognized the importance of community fridges. The caption to this item, contributed to the archive by user Lorraine on May 4, 2021, recites: “A class of 4th graders from PS 131 visit the Community Fridge as part of their learning about food insecurity and mutual aid”. This kind of archival material is of great importance to the NYCCFA because it shows that we can build better communities by teaching school children both about systemic problems such as food insecurity and about bottom-up initiatives to address them, all through a physical object that feels familiar and comforting: a community fridge. Guided by these considerations, the NYCCFA will collaborate with local educators to create curricula and teaching materials based on the archival items contained in the archive: these could be adapted for teaching a variety of subjects, including English as a Second Language, History, Social Studies, Science, and Environmental Awareness. Moreover, the NYCCFA could collaborate with local fridge communities and train students of all ages to record oral histories, collect, and prepare materials to submit to the archive, and organize their own local mutual aid initiatives.

When we asked fridge organizers and volunteers if they believed that this mutual aid initiative will last beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, their answer was a unanimous “yes”. Food insecurity and food waste have been a serious problem in New York City way before COVID-19. Food pantries are working hard at distributing food to people in need, but this kind of city initiatives still run into a number of issues that are independent of COVID-19:

1.   Due to the volume of the operation, Food pantries generally provide foods with a long shelf life to avoid food spoilage. This means that people do not have regular access to fresh foods, fruits, and vegetables. Community Fridges are locally organized, which allows them to provide fresh, nutritious foods regularly.
2.   It is not easy for everyone to access these government programs: undocumented immigrants, sex workers, the homeless, and formerly incarcerated people have a harder time registering for these assistance programs. With a community fridge, nobody has to sign up, show an ID, or declare their income; anyone can take what they need from a community fridge, no questions asked.
3.   Finally, there is an ethical issue: food pantries and soup kitchens are top-down initiatives that fall under the label of “charity”. While incredibly helpful to combat food insecurity, these programs deprive people of agency and dignity. Mutual aid initiatives such as community fridges are based on a horizontal system, where neighbors help neighbors. One day, a person might need food from a fridge; another day, they might donate food items they do not need. Community Fridges follow the motto “solidarity, not charity” and empower local residents to take care of each other, creating a human, compassionate dimension in city life.

Together with fridge organizers and volunteers, we believe that community fridges will be around even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. The NYCCFA will serve as a “working archive”, an ongoing initiative to document the phenomenon of community fridges as it evolves throughout the years.