The Love Fridge

by Dyana Daniels

Ali Mae Miller had seen posts on Facebook about an initiative to offer Chicago residents 24/7 access to food and knew she wanted to help. The tagline, “Take what you need, give what you can,” immediately resonated with her, so she went to her landlord and asked if she could use his unoccupied refrigerator sitting in the garage. She painted the oncewhite refrigerator in shades of blue and yellow, added hearts and wrote “toda amor,” meaning “it’s all love,” because that was what she felt from many of the Spanish-speaking community members in Logan Square.

“You'll have this fridge in the garage, and most people might want to throw some beer in it or something like that to just have a fridge in their garage,” Miller said. “But I was like, ‘Heck no, let's clean this thing up and let's get it out to the community – to people who really could use access to it.’”

Miller is one of the first people in Chicago to create an independent refrigerator for The Love Fridge. The Love Fridge Chicago, a mutual aid group with a goal to nourish communities while combating food waste and scarcity, was founded in July 2020 after Ash Godfrey saw a similar initiative in New York called Friendly Fridges. Similarly, the Friendly Fridges were a way for more residents in areas of New York like Brooklyn and Harlem to have access to food without judgment.

After asking friends of friends, she found someone who had already created an Instagram account and from there, they began to reach out to similar fridge inititives in California and New York for ideas on how to bring the idea to Chicago. “Our first goal was to find a host – we had to find electricity,” said Godfrey. “We emailed and talked to businesses and community members. And our first host site was actually one of our Love Fridge volunteers. He owned property and lives in Little Village.”

With a primary focus to support communities of color on the South and West sides of Chicago, The Love Fridge’s network now includes at least 19 refrigerators. The Greater Chicago Food Depository, the hub of a network of more than 700 food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other programs in Cook County, created a COVID-19 data map to help people understand which areas are being deeply impacted.

According to data on the map from the United Way United for ALICE project, 39 percent of households in Cook County could not afford all of their basic necessities such as housing, healthy food, childcare, health care and transportation.

Ali Mae Miller

Kathleen Hinkel

“Grocery stores are few and far between,” Godfrey said. “And even the stores that are there, the foods are not fresh or super healthy – so super limited options. And then with the pandemic, even if there are grocery stores nearby or you can make it to one, it's hard; money is tight for I think everyone right now."

Because of statistics like this, The Love Fridge is seen as an outlet to assist minority groups to gain access to resources that they may normally lack. “Chicago was built in a way to keep the communities very segregated,” said Ian Gonzalez, host of a Love Fridge location and owner and founder of Last Lap Cornerstore. “I do not even think it is just as far as segregated in the sense of race, but also socioeconomic segregation because the poor whites did not really mix with the affluent whites as well. And even in our community, we have places where the affluent Black people live versus the middle-class Black people.”

In this way, The Love Fridge gives people an opportunity to remember each other, think about each other and affect each other in a tangible way, Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez’s shop, located in Boxville at 332 E 51st St., is a running specialty shop and he is used to having customers from different areas in Chicago. And because he grew up in the community, Gonzalez sees having the refrigerators in areas such as the South Side, where traditionally, food deserts may be more prevalent, as a way to bring more neighborhoods together.

“It would be way easier if there wasn't a pandemic that limits us,” Godfrey said. “Right now, we've done two [food] drives where the community can come and drop off food. We haven't gotten to where we want to yet as far as involvement.”

Community members are also assisting with food distribution in some areas where the refrigerators are located. Take It Off My Plate, a campaign with the Black doula agency Chicago Birthworks, provided meals to mothers receiving “Love Packages,” but took the initiative one step further and reached out to women to see if they had any dietary restrictions and what were the best times to drop off meals to them. The love packages, care packages that included enough meals for the household and items like crayons, were created in response to the pandemic and social uprisings that began after the death of George Floyd to primarily support Black and Brown communities. Created by three Black women who happen to be mothers, Take It Off My Plate assisted in getting a Boxville Love Fridge location.

“This is our background – working in feeding the community,” said Zuri Thompson, Take It Off My Plate’s community connector. “And this is what we're currently doing. And we're on board for doing whatever we need to do to make it happen.”

The women of Take It Off My Plate have a personal connection to knowing what it means to exist during this time and having to navigate that, Thompson said. Because of this, Take It Off My Plate wanted to work with missions that are taking care of communities of color.

“For people to feel they're entitled to have access to nice things, to be fed and to see a lot of care and consideration go into that; it's life-changing,” Thompson said. “It is really empowering for people.”

The refrigerators are not only a source of food but also a piece of art. Like Miller, community members are encouraged to paint their refrigerators. Either the refrigerators or the shelters for them may be shrouded in art. Some may have

colorful splatterings of paint while others may have sayings like “Live, Love, Eat” or “Free Food For Everyone” accompanied by intricate portraits.

From there, food is added to the refrigerator. The food usually comes from community donations, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) boxes, the distributor Imperfect Foods and the occasional restaurant donation. But the food is gone almost as quickly as people can fill up the fridges, and how often people visit them is not monitored. Gonzalez has seen people donating food in Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods bags. And while members of The Love Fridge may stock the fridges at first, Miller, Gonzalez and Thompson have seen community members, and even some from other parts of Chicago, donate to the refrigerators. Recommended foods for donation include: cheeses, sealed and packaged foods, fresh fruit and vegetables, cured meats in sealed containers, bread and pastry.

“The fridge never stays full,” Gonzalez said. “I speak to most people who are donating the food, who come and drop food off. There are so many different faces – Black, Hispanic, white and everything in between. They are delivering food, and it is not just cheap stuff.”

Ian Gonzalez

Kathleen Hinkel

To make sure foods do not expire in the refrigerators, The Love Fridge ensures food safety by checking the refrigerators periodically through volunteer community members. The members can sign up for daily time slots to check on and clean the refrigerators. The refrigerator hosts also have a responsibility to check the refrigerators. For prepared meals, The Love Fridge asks that people label everything with an expiration date, the date the food was made and a list of ingredients.

The most pressing issue for The Love Fridge is not keeping the fridges stocked, but figuring out how the refrigerators will fare this winter. They began creating shelters for each unit after corresponding with a fridge initiative in Canada, but these refrigerators were not made for the outdoors. This way, they may have a “fighting chance.” The shelters are built to hold the refrigerator and have shelves situated next to the fridge for items that should not be refrigerated.

But they also plan to focus on shifting from offering fresh produce and canned goods to more household items such as laundry detergent, personal hygiene items and dry goods. “I'm so nervous about it,” Godfrey said. “Because these fridges aren't meant to be outside, they're just not.”

But problems revolving around Chicago’s weather are not restricted to just the winter. The Love Fridge had an incident over the summer where a refrigerator went out because of the heat and community members were concerned about what would happen to the food supply.

“It took two weeks to get another fridge, get it painted and get a shelter,” Godfrey said. “And as soon as the fridge was back, the community was so happy ... they had fallen in love with it.”

With communities growing attached to these refrigerators, people like Miller see the fridges as a way for more people to donate and give others more accessible food options. “I think that the more of these Love Fridges that pop up, how is it ever going to hurt,” Miller said. “The more these fridges that pop up, the more people are going to learn about The Love Fridge. Because believe it or not, there are still quite a few people out there that passed by on the street or even neighbors of mine and they don't even know that there's a fridge there that you can take or leave what you have.”

For more information on who to contact for larger donations or on what to donate, please visit: thelovefridge.com or email thelovefridgechicago@gmail.com.

Dyana Daniels is a Columbia College Chicago student majoring in multimedia journalism with a concentration in magazine writing. This piece was written for a Solutions Journalism course where students found a problem – and the people who could fix it.

Kathleen Hinkel

LOVE FRIDGE LOCATIONS

1. Honey Love 24/7 Access 3361 N. Elston Ave. Located behind Honey Butter Fried Chicken

2. Star Farm 24/7 Access 5155 S. Wolcott Ave.

3. Port Ministries 24/7 Access 5017 S. Hermitage Ave.

4. The Fridge on Marz 24/7 Access 3630 S. Iron St.

5. Oasis de Yum at La Roca 24/7 Access 2959 W. Pershing Road

6. Behind Last Lap Corner Store at Boxville 24/7 Access 332 E 51st St.

7. Dirt Farms 24/7 Access 3419 W. North Ave. Alley behind Humboldt's Used Books

8. Moreno's 24/7 Access 3724 W. 26th St.

9. The Love Shack 24/7 Access 2751 W. 21st St.

10. Toda Amor Carniceria La Mejor 24/7 Access 2915 N. Milwaukee Ave.

11. Blnk [Food] Bank 24/7 Access 3206 W. Armitage Ave.

12. Comida Para el Pueblo 24/7 Access 1855 S. Blue Island Ave.

South Shore 24/7 Access 2465 E. 74th St.

True Love Fridge at Takorea Cocina Tuesday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 9 p.m. 1022 N. Western Ave.

El Refri de la Vida Monday - Friday 7 a.m. - 2 p.m. & 5 - 8 p.m. Saturday 8 a.m. - noon Sunday 9 a.m. - noon 4215 W. 59th St.

Good Neighbor Love Fridge 24/7 Access 6601 S. Pulaski Road

Bidi Bidi Bam Bam at Hangry’s 24/7 Access 5000 W. Fullerton Ave.

Sacred Keepers Thursday & Friday 12 - 4 p.m. 4445 S. King Drive

The Kindness Korner 24/7 Access 11201 S. Ave G

Getting Grown Collective 24/7 Access 6344 S. Morgan St.

The Dill’s Chiller At the Dill Pickle Food Co-op 8 a.m. - 9 p.m. or during store hours (subject to change for holidays or as necessary) 2746 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Stone Temple Fridge 24/7 Access 3622 W. Douglas Blvd.

Kathleen Hinkel

FOOD DONATION GUIDELINES

YES :)

• Sealed packaged goods

• Cheeses

• Fresh Fruit

• Fresh Vegetables

• Table sauces

• Pastry

• Bread

• Unopened pasturized milk & yogurt

• Unopened fruit juices

• Fresh eggs (with a use-by date)

• Cured meats (in a sealed container w/ use-by date)

NO :(

• Raw meat

• Raw fish

• Alcohol

• Raw milk cheeses

• Unlabelled foods

• Multi-ingredient items

• Half-eaten leftovers