Description goes hereWhat You Need To Know

Selma Raven and Sara Allen started a community fridge in May 2020, inspired by the memory of Raven's hunger advocate son

Their team of volunteers feed 1,800 people a week

The food is mostly from local organizations and businesses that would have tossed it in the trash. The Friendly Fridge rescues 60,000 pounds of food each month

The borough’s community refrigerators — fewer than during the pandemic — are strapped for cash as well as volunteers to transport food.

ABC NEWS December 24, 2021

How community fridges are helping fight hunger in neighborhoods across the country.

A lonely refrigerator sits on a Bronx sidewalk at 242nd Street and Broadway. It’s not trash.

Painted in bright yellows, purples, oranges and blues, the fridge has “Free Food” written in bubble letters across its freezer, with the same in Spanish, “Comida Gratis,” on its side.

Selma Raven makes good on that promise. She doesn’t ask prodding questions of those who visit the fridge. She sometimes chats as she disinfects the unit, which is plugged into a socket inside of a restaurant, and stocks it with fresh produce and ready-made meals.

“We don’t know everyone's story,” Ms. Raven said. “We’re really just trusting them.”

Description goes"We want to normalize the idea of your community being something you can support on a regular basis in a small way so that everyone's lives are just a little bit easier," says Sara Allen, co-organizer of the community fridge along with fellow Bronx resident Selma Raven. "Just because you're not going to use [something] doesn't mean it needs to go to waste."

Allen and Raven have teamed up to support sustainability in the Bronx while also fighting food insecurity (a challenge one in five New Yorkers face) by making leftover food from restaurants and people's home kitchens available to those who need it. here

In May, two months after Marianne Pita recovered from Covid-19, she heard about a fridge set up on a street corner not far from her house in the Bronx. Neighbors and local businesses could donate food – homemade, store-bought, or leftover from a day’s sales – and anyone who needed food could take some.

The fridge helps feed people in the middle of a pandemic and mass unemployment – in a year where as many as 54m Americans could need food aid.

There are no strings attached and no questions asked, says Pita.

Artists and community activists have teamed up to fight food insecurity in New York by filling fridges with free healthy food.

Community members interested in joining the "friendly fridge" movement acquire fridges and work with local businesses to get permission to plug them in. Volunteers come by a few times a day to clean and stock the fridges.

The appliances began to pop up during the coronavirus pandemic, which has left thousands in the city food insecure.

May 18 is normally a somber day for Selma Raven. Seven years ago her 21-year-old son Michael, a passionate health food advocate known for his “no one should go hungry” mantra, died. But on this year’s anniversary, sadness turned to inspiration after Raven’s partner, Sara Allen, scrolled through Instagram and saw a community fridge filled with crisp apples and butter lettuce underneath a simple sign, "free food."

“It was a sight Micheal would have loved,” Raven said. “We decided to investigate.”

The couple, who live in the Bronx, bought a refrigerator together that same day and went grocery shopping. Shortly after and with permission, they set up shop outside a locally owned storefront. Every day for the past six weeks, they spend 45 minutes stocking the fridge with donated eggs, potatoes and spinach among others-- careful to mind their business as hungry neighbors get off the popular Van Cortlandt Park subway stop, curious to see what’s for dinner.

“Take what you need, leave what you can,” Allen said. “It’s a phrase that was painted on the front by a Bronx artist a few days ago and it really hit home. This is our community taking care of itself.”

Sara Allen tells the New York Beacon that many were wary and were not sure of what to expect. Nowadays, the neighborhood loves and embraces it. “Many will be proud to tell you about this refrigerator and how it has helped so many. It is truly a community project. On the block, there are barbers, cab drivers, deli owners, and other small business owners that participate in keeping this project going”, said her with a smile on her face.

However, she reminds us of things we should be aware of: “So much food is wasted, and that waste could feed so many if we could divert it straight to places that are accessible such as these community fridges and pantries. We are always looking for ways to rescue food.”

The Friendly Fridge BX, below the last 1 train stop in the Bronx, is impossible to miss. Cardboard boxes and milk crates overflowing with loose sweet potatoes, corn, garlic scapes and heads of cabbage regularly extend into the sidewalk from a forest green shed, where inside sits a fridge, painted yellow, orange and sky blue, with a raised green fist grasping a carrot.

Depending on the time of day, pulling open the door can reveal a kaleidoscopic spread of plastic clamshells stuffed with berries or sliced watermelon, an entire row of heads of lettuce—even prepared meals of chicken and rice from Best Deli & Grill down the block. Come an hour later, and it might all be gone. Written in English and Spanish on the shed is the mantra “take what you need, leave some for others.” For over a year, thousands have come to depend on this philosophy to put food on their tables.

Community fridges like the Friendly Fridge BX long predate the pandemic, having been scattered from California to Texas to Arkansas as isolated projects. But over the past 19 months, in the wake of mass unemployment and faltering emergency food systems, the concept has exploded across the U.S. as a broad grassroots movement aimed at combating food insecurity on local levels. Hundreds of fridges adorned in bright colors have begun popping up outside restaurants and delis, houses of worship and people’s homes, all promising free food to those who need it.