It’s an 86-degree summer day in late June. Open the painted door of the refrigerator—this one set next to the garden bed at Lakewood bulk store Part & Parcel—and you’ll find stacks of rainbow chard, a few cantaloupes, two pints of blueberries, and a drawer full of beets. Fresh produce is abundant this season, but on another given day you might find the refrigerator stocked with premade sandwiches, containers of soup, loaves of bread, and much more.
In October 2022, new local organization Durham Community Fridges (DCF) launched with its first community fridge in the Triangle located at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church at 1902 West Main Street. What began as a group of passionate individuals has since grown into an expansive network of volunteers, partners, and coordinators, all with a shared belief in access to free food for all.
A second community fridge opened at Part & Parcel in July 2023, and there are now plans for a third Durham fridge to begin operating later this year outside Omie’s Coffee Shop. DCF hopes to expand to more neighborhoods in Durham to increase food access for the community; earlier this year the network also expanded to Chapel Hill, with a fridge hosted by the Community Empowerment Fund.
Community fridges tend to be set up as refrigerators, freezers, and food pantries where anyone can drop off or take food. They often also act as a way to mitigate waste, with restaurants, organizations, and households dropping off surplus food. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when nonprofit organizations were overwhelmed with high rates of need and federal aid lagged, mutual aid groups stepped in to fill the gaps.
Community fridge database Freedge currently lists 375 community fridges in the United States, a growing number that reflects growing food insecurity issues. In 2023, 27 percent of adults in the United States experienced food insecurity, an increase from 24.9 percent in 2022.
In Durham, DCF volunteers regularly table at community events, spreading awareness about the organization and distributing free food to community members where they are. Such events include the monthly Really Really Free Market and, more recently, rallies supporting Palestine.
“We’ve been to different Palestine rallies, and that of course intersects with our work very importantly—food apartheid over there has the same roots as the food apartheid here,” shares Beau Borek, a member of the DCF team. “We really see our work very interconnected with the Palestinian struggle in that way.”
“To a lot of people, protesting against genocide seems radical, but to me it’s human,” Taylor Holenbeck, another DCF organizer, says. “And the same thing here—to give out free food could be perceived as a radical act, but it really is just a human act. Because it’s just a right, just as life is a right, food is a right.”
Holenbeck works as the grower services coordinator at Happy Dirt, a produce distributor that focuses on organic produce and the creation of more sustainable food systems, and Borek teaches at Lakewood Montessori Middle School. Both Holenbeck and Borek have dedicated significant time and resources to DCF since its inception (Holenbeck even donated his old refrigerator, which became the first Durham community fridge).
Nonprofit CANDOR runs Part & Parcel, the host of DCF’s second community fridge location. An eco-conscious, package-free grocery store, Part & Parcel’s business is modeled on disability, economic, environmental, and food justice movements—making it an ideal partner for DCF.
Even before playing host to the fridge, Part & Parcel became a partner in the biweekly West End Free Market in Lyon Park. The market distributes fresh produce from local farms and dry goods from Part & Parcel, free of charge, to 85 households.
“At every single access point that is trying to enhance the food security of people, there are parameters around it,” CANDOR founder T Land explains. “And as much as we try to remove those obstacles—for example, you don’t have to prove need when you shop with us [at the market] and there aren’t limits—but you do have to be there on a Thursday at two o’clock.”
“With a community fridge,” Land continues, “those other barriers aren’t there either, but a community fridge is 24/7. No matter your schedule, you can get there. If you can get there, you can get food.”
DCF is a mutual aid effort, not a nonprofit, which dictates its structure and operations.
“We have no fiscal sponsors or financial backing at all,” Holenbeck explains. “We purely operate off of our time as the biggest resource and the community pitching in and donating food to the fridges.”
Keeping The Doors Open
There are many benefits to the mutual aid model. There are also realistic challenges.
“The nonprofit relies on the current capitalist structure. They have more resources, they have more agility,” Borek explains. “We’re more interconnected and we’re reliant on the community—which maybe moves slower but, to me, is more abundant and stronger.”
Not relying on donations or grant funds means that DCF doesn’t adjust goals and values to align with funders’ requests or grant requirements. Though resources are more limited, they are also more consistent and reliable, organizers say.
Still, other local for-profit and nonprofit organizations pitch in: regular food donations are received from Baggingit4kids, Root Causes, Feed Durham, Whole Foods, and other sources.
“We’ve seen a lot of those food rescue orgs utilize the fridges as places to take the food they’re rescuing instead of certain pantries,” Holenbeck says. “It’s a much more accessible and immediate place to take food that gets taken the same day typically.”
There are very few hard and fast guidelines when it comes to community fridges—an intentional ethos, according to organizers: close oversight can create additional barriers for people in need. The open nature, though, does come with its own challenges.
Some community members and fridge visitors, for instance, have expressed concern that people may abuse the fridge system and take more than their fair share, leaving nothing for the next person.
A few months ago I made a drop-off at the first DCF location at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, and after unloading, an Uber driver who was parked on the street and waiting to schedule a ride waved me over to his car. He began by thanking me for bringing over the surplus food and then relayed that he’d regularly seen people visiting the fridge and nearly emptying it of its contents. Several volunteers and fridge visitors have also expressed concern that some people may be reselling the food.
Nevertheless, Holenbeck contends: “You can honestly have as much as you want. It’s not our place to govern that or to surveil.”
One way DCF has responded to the challenge is by creating fridge status updates on its website. Fridge visitors can submit a form reporting how full the fridge is, what its contents are, and offer feedback on what they’d like to see more of.
“There are probably so many things that people think are gonna be problems, and it’s an imagined deterrent from someone being able to set up something like that in their own spaces,” Land says. “And we just haven’t hit any kind of challenge that has ever outweighed the benefit.”
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