Episode 3 - The Friendly Fridge with Selma Raven and Sara Allen

Damon Williams: Welcome to One Million Experiments, a podcast showing and exploring how communities are creating a world without police and prisons. It's me, I'm Damon, I'm here.

Daniel Kisslinger: I'm Daniel, and we're two Chicago-based podcast hosts and movement workers who every month are bringing you a conversation with the practitioners, thinkers, and actors of these experiments, which are expanding and redefining what safety and protection mean. We're so excited to be hosting this podcast, brought to you by AirGo, Interrupting Criminalization, and Project NIA.

Damon: Each month we hop into the lab the different emerging community-based project, program, or experiment, not only to amplify and broadcast the amazing work but to invite you, the listeners, our people, our folks in community into practice, into the process of building your own experiments. Creating a world beyond carceral systems is a collaborative project, and we need people. Listen not just to learn, not just to absorb, but also as a space for inquiry and as a space for research, as we are inviting as many people as possible to get into this work.

Daniel: As the work continues here, we want to invite in our fearless co-host and partner in this project, the brilliant and wonderful Eva Nagao from Interrupting Criminalization is here.

Damon: [jungle cat noise]

Damon: Instantly. I promised and there it is. There it is. That is a large jungle cat, for those who were waiting for it, and it is here.

Eva Nagao: It just gets better and better. It's great to be back with you all.

Daniel: Eva, did the jungle cat, which was promised last episode, live up to your expectations?

Eva: It was well worth the wait.

Daniel: Dam, could you maybe pull it out one more time?

Damon:  [jungle cat noise]

Daniel: Just dynamic.

Damon: I'm here for the people, I'm here to serve.

Daniel: Now that we got that out of the way, Eva, we're so excited to welcome you back onto the show to break down who we're talking to here on Episode 3, who do we got joining us today?

Eva: Today we're in conversation with Selma Raven and Sara Allen, some of the people who are integral to the working of the Bronx Friendly Fridge.

Daniel: Yes, it was such a joy to get to chop it up with Selma and Sara. Their fridge at 242nd Street in Broadway in the Bronx was one of the first community fridges to pop up in the midst of the pandemic, and we got to learn so much about how the project started, what it is, but more importantly, what being the practitioners of this project and this experiment has meant for Selma, Sara, and the other folks involved.

Damon: I'm really excited to share this conversation with folks. I think just exemplifying the point that abolitionist work or transforming the society towards the systems we want doesn't mean, create all cops. When a lot of people hear abolition or a world without police, it's like, "Well, then, what is the new type of cop-like thing?" I think the work and the development and the growth and expansion of consciousness that they express through their story and through their work shows the type of world and community-building that usually starts with things much more essential.

Hearing how just the basic work of providing food for a community and beyond started to shift these different forms of relationship was just really exciting.

Eva: It's a cautionary tale for people who engage in abolitionist work, you may even become an abolitionist.

Damon: It happens. You don't expect it.

Daniel: Eva, is there anything else that before we hop into this conversation you feel like we should folks know?

Eva: The reason that we really wanted to highlight these fridge programs early on in the series is something that I forget if Selma or Sara says it in this episode, but they are describing getting into this work as bold action without permission. Just like Damon said at the top, that's really something that we're inviting people in to do: bold action without permission.

I hope that this series both encourages people into that space and also paints a picture of how you can do that responsibly, proactively, creatively, and in community. Selma and Sara are such a great example of that.

Daniel: you can find out more and support the work of the Friendly Fridge on their Instagram, instagram.com/thefriendlyfridgebx. It's also just like a very fun and pleasant Instagram to follow. There's dogs and refrigerators full of food and all that kind of stuff. As always, as a reminder, you can find out more about this and all of the other experiments at millionexperiments.com.

Damon: All right, now let's hop into the lab with Selma and Sara of The Friendly Fridge.

Daniel: We are so excited to be jumping into this conversation with Selma Raven and Sara Allen, who we have on the line with us here. A subdued air horn.

Selma Raven: I like that.

Daniel: Let's start with the same two-part question that we start every episode with, which is in this time, however you define time, how is the world treating you, and how are you treating the world?

Sara Allen: You want us to answer that question? That's it.

Daniel: There's no else to answer it. We'll answer it if you won't answer it.

Sara: How is the world treating us, and how are we treating the world?

Selma: I think right today, after a big community event yesterday, I feel this tiny piece of the world in the Bronx here is looking good, but for the most part, there's just so much wrong with so many different things. On our part, we're just trying our best one day at a time to be good to the world. In general, in this year and a half of this particular initiative, we're learning a lot, some of it is really exciting as we see change, and some of it really disappointing.

Sara: We have gone through a lot of learning over the last year and a half since we started this project that I'm sure we're going to talk about, and it has given us a lot of perspective on how we view the world. Both of us, I think I can speak for both of us, have learned to become more self-aware about how we handle ourselves in different spaces, whether it's from privilege, whether it's from color, whether it's from social-economic advantage or disadvantage. However that adds up, how do we treat the world and how did the world treat us, it's an evolving process right now.

Daniel: It's beautiful to see that transformation internally be such a big part. There's what the project does in the world, which we'll get into, but there's also what it does as participants. I think that's such a big part of what this whole series is exploring. Before we get into all that learning, let's start at the very beginning of this project. Our central metaphor for this show is experimentation and experiments, and every experiment starts with a hypothesis. What was your y'all's hypothesis of what this project would be, what it would create when you first set out?

Sara: When we first started out, we didn't really have a hypothesis. We thought, "We're just going to do this, and we'll think later." When we got inspired to put a refrigerator on a sidewalk and plug it into someone's restaurant, we didn't even know who would allow us to plug this refrigerator in. I think we thought, "Times are desperate now, so everyone would jump on," so maybe that would be the hypothesis.

The first few answers were-- I don't know if I can say this on video, but it began with the word "Ass" and it ended with the word no. The second two responses were, "Maybe." The fourth response was, "Absolutely, let's do it," and that fourth response was from someone who his family is seen in the community as not White. His religion is seen in the community as somewhat of a threat. It was interesting to see who showed up for this experiment.

I think the hypothesis was, "We can do this. We don't know how we can do this. We don't know who's going to show up for this." We were proven over and over again that what we thought we were getting into was not what it was going to be, and it was so much better.

Selma: Yes, I hate to say, but we were so ignorant going in. We just had this great idea that we thought, "We need to do this. It's just something that we have to do." We saw what was happening in our neighborhood with just hunger, but we didn't really think it through. We didn't do the research. We just went with our gut like, "Hey, why not? Why can't we plug in a fridge, buy it on Craigslist, and plug it in and fill it?" We didn't have a hypothesis.

Sara: No, but going back to your first question, how we treat the world and how the world treats us, honestly, I feel like, in some way, we didn't know this, but we may have been approaching this from somewhat of a charity perspective, and we very quickly found out that's not how we wanted to operate, and that way, the learning started. We started learning about mutual aid.

We started learning about the history of mutual aid, all of the players in it. The shoulder that we stand on goes all the way back to when slavery was first ended, even before that. Then really, when you think about it, we stand on the shoulder of the Black Panther, the free lunch program, et cetera, et cetera. It's not charity, it's literally neighbors helping neighbors. The hypothesis was that we were going to do this thing to help others, and it turned out that everyone was helping us, too.

Damon: Hyper-admittedly, we're using this experiment sciency metaphor clinically, and it's awkward for us, right, because there's attention because your endeavor and so much of the work that we're covering, it does not follow that same institutional framework of there is all of this "authorized" knowledge work that happens before and then it gets resourced, and then it has a trial run, and then it gets more resources. So much of the learning comes in practice.

We use language hypothesis or even research loosely because we know and what I think we're proposing is that so much of the building comes in the doing. In just like being honest about that, don't take our science experiment things too literal. I hear this vision of just one to do good human work and this shift of understanding from charitable contribution to mutual aid and a more transformative project.

What was the moment that prompted that knowledge inquiry or their research of, "Oh, I thought I was just giving food, but this is actually connected to abolition and to the Black Panthers and that's relevant to what I'm doing today"? What prompted that research?

Selma: I think one of the things that prompted it is when we first began, we plugged in the fridge, and we were like, "Okay, we're not going to be able to sustain it." We went door to door talking about it and saying, "Hey, do you want to make any donations? We are looking for perishables. We're looking for produce." We made the biggest mistake of stopping at a local precinct. We talked about it, and we came home. I have a 22-year-old daughter, and she was appalled. She was not even kidding. She said, "Mom, I cannot believe it." At that point, it was really in the midst of a very volatile situation.

Sara: This actually happened right after George Floyd.

Selma: There was a huge conversation. We had to really think because, honestly, I'm embarrassed to say we didn't really think things through. We just wanted to do this because we knew it needed to be done.

Right now, thank God, a year and a half later, we have a new model: bold action without permission, from mutual aid, like, "Let's just do it. Apologize later. Let's have 900 pounds of food out here and when the Department of Health comes, we'll figure it out. Let's just do it." At that point, I'm embarrassed to say we didn't know the difference. We learned a lot.

Damon: In a lot of our work, we have an ongoing tag that some of our listeners might recognize as a shoutout to moms. In this instance, I really want to shout out to daughter because I want to dig in on that provocation a little bit more because it's actually really exciting because I think it's easy to just have the conversation of communal food-based mutual aid work already coming out of the politic, right?

What I hear and the fact that you visit the precinct is you may not have identified as abolition or making the connection to carceral systems and scarcity or all the big words that we can do. I want to pull into there was a visceral moment with someone that you cared about and cared about you that stood some ground. Don't be embarrassed, it's actually really important because we need more people to be provoked in this way. What were some of the tension? What were some of the earth, what awoke for you in being challenged by your daughter in that way?

Selma: Initially, I was mad because I felt like we knew more. Of course, our mom and this is step-mom, and she was like, "Sara, you, too? You're the younger and more conscious," she thought. She said, "Sara you went to the precinct?" and Sara was embarrassed too. We were defensive initially. She had no tolerance for our ignorance. She said, "Ignorance is not an excuse, Mom. You should know better." It was tense. Do you remember that time?

Sara: I do.

Selma: It was just hard.

Sara: Let me give a little bit of background. I've been out of the closet now since I was 19. I'm 46 now. Nowadays, when I hear LGBTQ and the alphabet gets longer and longer every year, I'm thinking now with a tone of apprehension and somewhat sarcasm and complete admiration because Jeannie knows the letter of all of that alphabet. She can tell me the definition, and she can tell me why this means what, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm looking at her thinking, "How do I not know that because I'm gay? I've been gay since before you were born." I have to take a step back and listen. Bringing the conversation back to the precinct -  they were terminology that I have not heard. I've not heard anti-blackness. I've not heard a slew of terms that are used to describe situations and politics, et cetera, et cetera.

Jeannie took the time after we got an over initial appointment, she went over these terms with us, and we suddenly thought, "Look, oh, shit, she's right. We see it. We see it." It's almost like one of those magic eyes where if you stare at it long enough, the shit starts to come out. You have to get comfortable with seeing that magic. Now you have to sit back and take a look at it and go, "Okay, I see it now." Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Jeannie was very, very pivotal for us in that moment.

Selma: We won't tell her, though, right? I'm kidding.

Sara: No. Don't tell her that.

Daniel: She's a big listener. She loves the show. To that point, how far into the process did that conversation happen?

Sara: Two months.

Selma: Yes, two or three months.

Sara: I remember very clearly, it was just after George Floyd happened.

Selma: It was right after George Floyd.

Daniel: Whether it was immediate or over time, how did that conversation shift if not the day-to-day practice of how the fridge worked, at least the way that y'all were thinking about it, beyond just not going to the precinct for food?

Selma: Oh, it shifted. We had our three "No politics, no profits, no police" for a long time. We had it on our vision board in our kitchen, remember?

Sara: Yes. I wanted to describe another moment that happened where we realized that the narrative around the fridge, we have to be careful with it. I won't mention names. We had a group and then some other group. This group is typically a group of moms, a group of women, I should say a group of women who decided that they were going to put together an Amazon wishlist and get everyone to order things for the fridge.

In theory, a good idea but what it created was an atmosphere of charity. It created an atmosphere, "Oh, we're helping these poor people." The conversation around it was exactly that. "We're helping these people. Those people, these people. We're helping, helping, helping," and we didn't want that. We wanted food that was going to be discarded or we wanted food to come from food pantries that they had leftover. We wanted food to come from the neighbor who e had a few extra bananas to come put that in there.

It needed to be neighbors helping neighbors, not neighbors helping unfortunate neighbors. It was a very slight difference. Like I said, once you see it, you can't unsee it. You start seeing everything from that perspective. We eventually had a conversation with this group of women, and it blew up. We got exactly what we thought would happen. I'll be frank, it was White fragility.

It was very much a sense of "but we're just trying to help those people - you assholes," but you might want to omit that. It was bad. It was really bad. They went on a rampage on Facebook and other social media channels, and we had to lay low for that. Not that it was an issue for us long-term, but it was just so interesting and not surprising to see this play out and this speed. We kept putting our foot down over and over. "No, no, no." Over time, the fridge community stuck by it and grew even larger because that was not allowed. That element was not allowed to persevere.

Daniel: I think, though, it's those moments of values-testing and values-clarifying in practice that then, to that point of once you see it, you can't unsee it, things that you didn't know as a sentence of "Oh, this is what we believe," when they get tested, it clarifies. At least that's been my experience in some of that. What does it mean to learn in practice? It's something that felt a little muddy, or you were trying, you see what it looks like in real-time, "Oh, this is actually what I'm standing on here."

Damon: I want to get more into some of the nuts and bolts of the fridge and of the infrastructure and some of the lessons, but I'm hearing that within a few months or so, the constructs of charity and the presence of police for you was transformed. The takeaway so far is once you see it, you can't unsee it. I feel like really, I don't know, just the opportunity of someone who was able to see on the other side of the matrix more recently because you're right, I've unseen it for so long that it's almost hard to remember what it was before. My ask is, what would you say to folks now, how would you step in? Jeannie is her name?

Selma: Yes.

Damon: How would you play the Jeannie role for someone who is still upholding charitable constructs or is not critical of policing or police presence when trying to do good work like, "Oh, this is just another space that we can get resources from"? Now that your community and your practice has transformed you, how would you provoke someone or lovingly challenge someone who hasn't had that transformation yet?

Selma: That's a good question, right? That's a good question. We haven't been really provoked into that, but we make our stand very clear now. We just make it very clear. We say, "This initiative stands on the shoulders of the Black Panthers. It's neighbors helping neighbors. If you want to order from Amazon, maybe take it somewhere else." We tell them about the other places that accept it.

I said, "Please support our local neighbors. I have a list of people who you can buy a sandwich from or buy produce from. We don't need anything from there." Recently, when we were vandalized-- It wasn't really vandalized. It was just a big mess. Somebody who was in a different mode calls me and says, "Oh, I'm going to call the 5th Precinct." I said, "No, we are here together to clean it up."

We walked down to the fridge, neighbors walked in. We had cleaned it and swept it in less than 25 minutes. She said, "Let's call the precinct and report it." I said, "There's no need to, we're here. We're here helping each other." I think just talking about it casually, I don't feel as able to as Jeannie does because she has the knowledge. She grew up here, she's gone to college here. She's 23.

Sara: 24.

Selma: 24 now. She thinks she knows everything, but she really knows a lot in those areas. We try not to lecture people. We try not to lecture. We still get occasional-- They're like, "I don't understand why you don't do it this way," or "I don't understand why we can't have a box at the 5th here that they can put cans on Thanksgiving?" I'm like, "We're good."

Sara: You know what, you just brought up something. There's a couple of things. One, I'm White. I hear a different conversation sometimes, especially in all-White spaces. I'll hear a few comments, and it's just laced with, "We have to help these people." I just smile like a Cheshire cat and wait quietly and jump in. What I try very hard to do is-- I like what you said, lovingly.

Sometimes it can't be lovingly, it needs to be to the point and straight to the jugular and you walk away. Whether or not they take it and do something with it, you may never know or you may see it next week. At the same time, I just have a conversation at work not too long ago, do you do it in a public space or do you do it in a private space? My policy is to do it in a public space because if someone else is watching you, they're more likely to do it again themselves somewhere else.

We have had conversations at the fridge where someone would walk by and make a nasty comment, and someone else would just respond to it. The important thing is that the message is consistent, we're not going anywhere. This means too much to too many people, and you're not the only one that is hurting in some way. It's a conversation that is so multifaceted because there is color, there is classism, there is so many different things at play.

We just talked about this the other night, we can't save each other, but we can be each other's ally. I think that's an important distinction because if I jump in every time a White person picked a fight with Lily, our fridge manager, which we all know this person is picking a fight with Lily because she's Brown, and she has an accent, it's very clear that that's what it is. I can't jump in and save her, but I can stand there and stare at the person, just look at them like, "What are you doing?" That whole fight that argument, I think it's a case-by-case basis, really, but you have to be consistent.

Daniel: As we're talking about how these dynamics are at play, I want to ground it a little bit geographically and a little bit in space. Spoiler alert for the listeners, I happen to have grown up in the same space where this work is happening, and there's a ton of overlap between some of the people at play and my family and where we've tapped into food and food work and making sure that we're advocating for a world where people aren't going hungry.

For someone who has never been to 242nd Street in Broadway, how would you describe the social geography of the place? What do people need to know about that particular cross-section because fridges exist all over the city and now all over the world but this is a particular location that we're talking about? What do people need to know about that corner?

Selma: That's a great question, by the way, because I was born and raised in Africa, moved to the Bronx. I've lived here and raised three kids here right around this area. This is my community, but it's an interesting area for listeners because where the fridge is located is right under the 1 Train. It's the last stop of the 1 Train, and there are various bus lines going into Yonkers, going into Marble Hill...going into West Farms in the South Bronx.

It's a real big connecting place. That's why we get 200 to 300 visitors a day sometimes to this really ordinary fridge. Then five minutes from there or three minutes from there is Fieldston and Riverdale. We have the most expensive hilltop schools, the most expensive private schools in the country, and the most expensive homes. It is a huge dichotomy. It's really, really a contradiction but it is a community that in a year and a half has come together.

Daniel: Could you elaborate a little bit on that? Obviously, there are still tensions and contradictions. What have you seen that two years ago, you would have been like, "Oh, that never would have happened"?

Sara: One sure thing about one of the most expensive schools, Riverdale Country, they make sure that all of their extra food makes this way to the fridge. They're amazing about it. The other schools, we haven't heard from them, and it's very easy for them to redirect the food. I'm not saying that they should, but it's just interesting. Also, there are several temples and churches in this area.

So many of them have turned out with different projects to get their kids involved, to show them what it's like to help the neighborhood, they show them how you can help the neighbors. You don't just send $500 A month or $50 a month to the ASPCA and it just goes into the void, it actually produces food that is placed in the refrigerator, and someone walks by and opens the door and picks it out.

I remember one time we saw a little boy and his mom, and he was from one of the local schools. His mom bought him to the fridge to bring a bunch of sandwiches. He must have been eight or nine years old. He opened the fridge, he put in his sandwiches. He walked away, and right when he walked away, someone ran down the stairs from the last stop of the 1 Train, opened the fridge, grabbed a sandwich, put it in his pocket, and walked away.

The little boy had this look of complete shock and, in some ways, amazement that his sandwich got taken by someone on his way to work or on his way to home or wherever he was gone. I think it really hit him because it's not something where you donate in cans into a box that just disappears. When we think about the area that we live in, I think in some ways, some of these hilltops schools or some of the communities are getting the opportunity to actually see some of this in action actually playing out. I don't know what it's doing necessarily to the overall mindset.

Selma: Well, actually, the schools are now reaching out to us to come in and talk to the students. I think things are changing. Just like we are starting to learn and change, I think with the students, too, this is changing things, I think.

Sara: I don't know if you remember our neighborhood hall, they opened a refrigerator there, too. The idea is spreading.

Daniel: I have my personal rabbit holes of that of...For reference, and this will lead to a question, I promise, every Wednesday or Thursday as a kid when my mom would pick me up, we would then have to go there to pick up the CSA. I would be tasked with weighing out the potatoes and going step by step through the CSA and mostly, I wanted to dribble a basketball on the other side, but I'd be tasked with helping to go through the vegetables.

Damon: What is the CSA?

Daniel: CSA is community-supported agriculture. For folks who don't know, instead of me defining it, do you all want to define what a CSA is?

Selma: Well, when you want to support the local farmers, you buy a share, and families buy a share, and then like he went and he picked it up every Thursday, I know, from 2:00 to 7:00, right?

Daniel: Exactly. We're usually there around 3:45.

Selma: Yes, my son, Michael, works there.

Daniel: With that familiarity, I wanted to ask what each of y'all his relationship was to food, food system work before this. You say it was clear to you from the jump, this needed to happen. Even if you were figuring it out as it went, why was this the place in this moment of pandemic crisis that y'all felt drawn to? Did you have experience working around food and this feeling like an important anchor for you?

Selma: For me, I had the typical experiences of dragging my kids to the CSA, doing the soup kitchens, forcing them to do things that I felt like they needed to know and learn. I don't remember even when-- I grew up in Tanzania, East Africa, I came here when I was 19. We had food, we were fine, I didn't know hunger. My connection was when Sara saw the fridge, the Instagram of the fridge in Harlem, it happened to be the anniversary of my son's death, and he was a huge food justice advocate.

He was part of GrowNYC Farm School, taking over abandoned lands and growing food. For some reason on that day, on that particular day on his anniversary, I said, "We have to do this" because I felt like it was a message, it was a sign. Mike would always say, "There's so much insecurity, there's so much food injustice." He was really young. "We can do something about it. The only way we can do is grow our own food. We need to grow food. That's the only way for food independence." At that point, I would be like, "Mike, I'm busy, I'm making lasagna, stop telling me these things. We got to get on with our day."

Daniel: You're like, "I didn't grow it, but I'm making it right now. If you want to make your own food, you could do it right now."

Selma: That was a huge piece. At a young age, he'd be like, "You got dough, you know how they treat their labor." I'm like, "It was two for five. I didn't really care." He's like, "You should care. What is wrong with you?" We want to be lectured. My experience with food came mostly from him very, very early on. He was influenced by farm school. Karen Washington was his big hero. He loved her, and she knew him well. That was my educating in food, but I didn't have any real hunger before then, before this transformation. I don't know.

Sara: I didn't have hunger when I was growing up, but I definitely grew up in a single-mom household where it was paycheck to paycheck. We went grocery shopping once a month...everything that was on an extreme budget. She wasn't in poverty necessarily, but she was definitely close. She had a family that would help. I think the reason why I bring that up is because that's what the pandemic did with a lot of folks.

Most folks are one paycheck away from being in serious trouble, whether that be homeless or not being able to eat or that type of thing. Hunger has been a low-grade fever in this country for God knows how long, but the pandemic kicked it up into high gear. Now it's raging at 104 degrees.

Daniel: In this next chapter of the pandemic, how have you seen the response or commitment to the fridge shift for better or for worse when it's not a brand new novelty anymore?

Sara: One huge shift that we're seeing at our particular fridge, we were number five in New York City, number one in the Bronx. At one point, there were 17 fridges in the Bronx and over 117 in New York City. That's not counting other refrigerators across the country. There are quite a handful in Chicago and LA, San Francisco, et cetera, et cetera. We're seeing some other refrigerators slow down because maintenance just wasn't possible over time. Those types of things are happening.

However, the refrigerators that are sticking around are the ones that have a very solid community base around it. Another thing that we're working very hard and we are succeeding is changing the narrative around lowering food waste as opposed to charity. We're trying to normalize the idea of, "Don't waste food. If you have extra food, you bring it to the fridge. Someone else can use it." There's a very slight but important difference there because it becomes accessible to everyone, not just to haves and have-nots.

Daniel: It's not just about meeting an acute need or an acute crisis, it's about an ongoing relationship to that food that you have in your home.

Sara: Exactly. In this country, we have a 35% waste issue, and we also have one in five people experiencing food insecurity. How do those two numbers exist at the same time? It makes no sense. One good example that we have is that someone from Riverdale, awesome woman, who works for a catering company, reached out to us and something you should know about Selma, Selma's been, as she said, part of the community, everyone knows her.

Selma: I was a preschool special ed teacher, so I know...

Sara: Everyone knows her, which has gone a long way in helping us get resources for the fridge. Anyway, this woman reaches out to us, and she's a caterer for the folks who set up stages for concerts. Central Park and City Field, both had concerts, and we got phone calls from them saying, "Hey, we have extra food from our catering event." There were four nights in a row, four mornings in a row, and afternoons in a row. We were getting 200 or 300 extra hamburgers.

Selma: Or salads, breakfast sandwiches...

Sara: She let us know if this doesn't go to the fridge, it goes in the garbage. You wouldn't believe how happy people were to stop by and grab an extra cheeseburger on their way to work. It was awesome.

Selma: We rented a U-Haul and just pick up all this food. Initially, we thought, "What's wrong with us? We've never done this before." We had to rebag it and repackage some of it. It was so worthwhile. We had kids from a local charter school that have just started, they're only seventh-graders. They're kids. We have a shelter nearby. We have regular folks. People have this misconception that "Oh, are you feeding the homeless?" No, we are feeding each other.

We eat from the fridge. All the volunteers take things from the fridge. We hang out there. It's working people who need it. It's amazing, just standing there. I just came from there, you just stand out there and hang out and get to know your community, and you hear their stories. It's amazing what's happening now, so we are grateful. Yes.

Damon: I'm so enthralled with all of what you're sharing and just want to relate of how these mutual aid practices and projects really make tangible some of this big theory thinking that we try to do when we take on the serious and sometimes overwhelming issue of how do we make the world better for people? I'm hearing, on a social level, just the interaction of a community engaging with each other around a material resource.

I'm hearing, on the political level, maybe we don't need to report this, or we report this to ourselves or our relationship to the carceral state and also starting to hear these things about economy. In work here in Chicago that has been mutually a base, there is these big notions of scarcity and abundance that people throw around. A figure, like you said, 35% of food is wasted, and one in five people are experiencing hunger. We can basically reduce that to, "We are throwing away more food than is needed to feed everybody."

A similar US statistic is that there are more vacant homes than there are houseless or homeless people. It becomes these not just issues of supply or abstract scarcity, there's not enough food being produced, or there's not enough houses to go around. It's really a notion of how things are distributed and how people participate in the economy. We had an experience here. We actually have a fridge in an organization we're connected. We call ours Love Fridges here in Chicago.

Sara: We know you.

Selma: We know you.

Sara: We know you.

Damon: We have one at our space. Then also a few years ago, we did this abolitionist land activation where we camped outside a torture facility for six weeks called Freedom Square that the Chicago police department offers and was in this organic mutual aid practice. The thing that Daniel and I were reflecting on in coming to this conversation is the economic activation of the philosophical concept of "If we build it, they will come." We would have these needs on this vacant lot. We didn't show up knowing it was a mutual aid center even though we...

Daniel: We didn't know that term. I didn't know that term.

Damon: We would call it resource redistribution at the time. We didn't even recognize it connected to the history of mutual aid until some folks from Puerto Rico connected to us and started making the explicit use of that language important. We would sit there and be like, "We need water." We would be surprised by the amount of people that would come from all over the Chicago land area and then we would go from not having water to having a surplus of water.

We need grillable meats or we were doing other resources, too, clothes and books, and you would be surprised in a way that challenges our understanding of the economy of one, there's not enough, and two, that people are apathetic and don't care. That's a lead-in like, "I didn't want to cheat and I'll give you our experience but in that notion of what have you learned about local microeconomics, what have you learned about distribution, and how people will show up when you build it?

Sara: You just set us up with some great feedback and experiences to relate to that.

Damon: Great. That's what I was hoping to do.

Damon: That was the plan. I'm so glad.

Sara: You nailed it, Damon, you nailed it.

Selma: Yes, that's right.

Daniel: Wow, the validation we receive, fantastic. We do it for the listener, but really, we're here for the great jobs.

Sara: This is the thing, going back to when Selma talked about the day that we set up the fridge, everyone was freaking out. We were suddenly becoming isolated from each other. We were afraid to leave our apartment. We were afraid to leave our homes. We were afraid to be within 20 feet of each other, but everyone was aware that something bad was happening. People want to help each other. They just don't know how sometimes.

I cannot tell you how many people, later on, came up to Selma or gave us feedback through Facebook and said, "Thank you for doing this because you gave us a way to help each other" because the thing about the fridge is that you can go to the refrigerator with your little gloved hand or your bottle of spray, open it up, put some food in, and walk away from it. A lot of the food banks and a lot of the food distribution lines were suffering from a lack of volunteers because everyone was so afraid to be around each other.

That was number one. Damon, what you said when you asked for water and a whole bunch showed up, people who wanted a way to help, they just didn't know how to do it. This was unprecedented. The other thing is the fridge filled a gap that food banks could not because there were so many people that were undocumented that were afraid. A whole bunch of us got stimulus checks. What about those who didn't?

They were stuck in this horrible position with very few options to act upon. Even if they were approached to say-- I'm saying "they" because we met a whole bunch of folks that ended up telling us what was going on. The first was, "No questions asked, come and get what you need." The pantries would ask that you click and count who came, how many came; we don't do that.

There was a complete sense of anonymity. That would have to be eye-opening, to be honest with you, that's something I've never had to think about. Damon, you're right, if you build it, they will come in ways that you never even realized. The government did what they could, but that's why we have mutual aid because the government has failed in so many different ways.

Daniel: I think that point about the relationship of being undocumented to getting access to support and food both in the form of stimulus but also just the hesitance or inability to participate in other forms of what gets deemed charity is a really important piece, especially because of who, on the other end of the food system, is the driving force of the labor a bit.

The ability for all that food to be there, whether it's for the fridge or for people's fridges at home, for many folks the way that that was made possible was by the continued labor in the midst of the opening days of the pandemic by the people who didn't have access to the support to gain that food and that ability to sustain themselves. When you say that it filled this gap or this hole, I think that's a really important piece, and it connects to the geography of what we are talking about, of this being this hub between different communities.

I want to connect it to something else that I've heard anecdotally, which is in being at the end of the train line, one of the things that happened in the midst of the pandemic was the city changing its policies in terms of kicking unhoused people off the trains overnight. What that did at a lot of the end of the different train lines in New York and I'm sure in other places, too, was that the end of train lines became important distribution hubs, not just for food but for clothes and PPE and other stuff like that. Did that come into play for y'all at 242nd Street?

Selma: Yes, we saw a lot of that, we still do. Even though we were just about food initially, it also became about clothing, about giving Metro cards. We find out that a young homeless person who's 22 will not find a shelter easily, they have to go all the way to 2nd Avenue to an intake center, and it takes days to figure out. The Department of Homeless Services is not as helpful, he has to make do with living in the park bench.

We found out that for homeless women, one of the big asks was we need diapers with Velcro because there are no bathrooms open from 242nd to 181st Street. There is so much we found out that was so humbling and so painful. Even now, now winter's coming, people are not going to give you hot water, they don't let you use the bathrooms during COVID. That was a huge ask: adult diapers.

Sara: Damon, for context, we live across the street from a very, very large park called Van Cortlandt Park. There's a lot of areas in there where homeless people can sleep on a bench pretty safely because it's still relatively lit, and it's close to Broadway. It's getting cold, and to the whole point, we're on the other side of the park, and to do that intake, you really have to travel to get there. It's not an immediate process at all.

Daniel: I love the Van Cortlandt context, that's key. I did just assume, I was like, "Oh, everyone knows, everyone went to see people play cricket in the Philharmonic in Van Cortlandt. Everyone's in there." That makes sense."

Damon: I had no idea. I want to give you guys some space to imagine, I want to get to the meat of it without projecting onto you too much because I'm really excited at-- Oh, no, I get a little over-excited with some of these...

Selma: We do, too...

Damon: Okay. Cool, cool, cool. There's some mutuality in our over-excitement. In what we've just heard thus far just in these last 18 months, just such an increased interaction, connection, relationship, awareness around so many intersecting social and political positions. We've talked about relationships to schools, we've talked about undocumented folks, we've talked about houseless and homelessness. Through your experimentation, capacity aside, what can you now imagine that was not possible, in terms of a safer, less violent, more healthy, more cohesive world for people? It's a big one, it's a big question, admittedly.

Selma: Oh, yes, and this is just imagining, right?

Damon: This is just imagining or if you got real...

Daniel: You don't have to do it tomorrow. For the record, this is not signing up, but it can be things that are already in motion or that you're already doing.

Damon: If it's easier to be more practical, that's helpful, too. I always feel like it's easier to start with the imagination and then come back home from there.

Selma: Yes. You go and then I'll...

Sara: I would love to find a company for wasting food. They have to find other ways to redo that food that's going to go to waste and not necessarily non-profit. It's been a very interesting thing because the refrigerator is not a non-profit, there are a lot of grocery stores and major institutions that will not send their food to be refrigerated.

I would love a system in which that did not happen. You can just simply share food that is otherwise going to go to waste. I would love sliding through a grocery store -

Selma: A food co-op right there.

Sara: -growing food.

Selma: Today we just discussed about a little piece of land right near the fridge, near Van Cortlandt. I said, "If we should just plant like Ron Finely and then apologize later, let's just wait for the last frost and then start growing." I'm sure you know the area. I'm like, "It's wasted, there's nothing happening, let's grow." That's one of our dreams.

Daniel: Do you know what that makes me think of? This is another Riverdale deep cut, and it's not there anymore. For our listeners, the fridge is at the bottom of a big hill, and one of the other ways up that hill at 230th Street, so a little further south, there's an area where a bunch of car servers and Uber drivers hang out and post up waiting for rides to be assigned. Do you know where I'm talking about?

Selma: Yes, I know exactly where.

Daniel: Until this past year, for probably five or six years, you'd drive by and you'd see 10, 12 guys there, and there was a small area where I started seeing cornstalks and tomato plants and other things being grown. This was not some external project, this was these men who were spending a huge portion of their day waiting, and what they did in that time was they grew food to eat, on the side of this hill in this tiny little area, and there's a fire hydrant and an apartment building right behind it. That to me, just personally, was a real eye-opening moment. I'm loving to think about this underutilized, underused space as a space to grow.

[00:47:14] Selma: There is so much. We were just talking about it this morning, and Sara was like, "How do we get water there?" I said, "The hydrant. We can do it legally, for sure, and get one of those little thingies," and she was like, "Okay," but I think we can, I know we can because once we start it, it's going to take off.

Selma: Yes, we can get one of those little thingies.

Daniel: So much of this work comes down to making sure you get the right little thingy for the thing.

[laughter]

Sara: Keep in mind, though, we had people tell us "Fuck no." We had cab drivers. Damon, more context, the cab drivers that are around that area are not Uber drivers or they're not Lyft drivers. What do you call them?

Selma: They've been there for 20 years. I'm sure you know that right near Broadway Jill's, the cabs just sit around there, they're regulars, they've been doing it for so long.

Sara: Those guys thought we were absolute lunatics, and now every single one of them supports and protects the fridge.

Damon: That's so important. What did you receive in their opposition or disbelief?

Selma: They thought we were crazy. They were like, "Look at these two old lesbians, what are they up to, they don't know what they're doing." The first time one guy said, "Why are you doing this? You've seen me around for years," He said, "Somebody's going to take the fridge." I was like, "Oh, then they probably needed it, I think it's going to be fine." Nobody took the fridge.

Daniel: It's so true to our experience, though, is the hesitance or the feeling of like, "Oh, someone's going to steal this." It's like, "Well, you can't steal something that's being given to them." That's actually what we want. It's not the fridge in this case necessarily but like, "Oh, someone's going to take the food when you're not looking." It's like, "Yes, we want people to take the food when we're not looking." [laughs]

Selma: Exactly. We got a lot of that, like, "Oh, it's not going to last." I remember one guy who's become our biggest ally, he's even letting us store stuff in his store right now, but in the beginning, he was like, "This is not a good idea, it makes people more dependent. I don't know why you're going to do it, I don't understand." I said, "We don't need them, but I think we can. Let's just keep doing it. Do you want to help us?"

Initially, he wanted nothing to do with it. Now, even yesterday, I said, "Can we use your storage just for a little while because we're getting a thousand pounds of zucchini and somebody donated it?" He was like, "Anything you want," I'm like, "Oh, wow, a year and a half later."

Sara: And had thought of making peanut butter and jelly, just for the fridge.

Selma: Yes. We were like, "Hey, we want to help out. Do you want to make some sandwiches for the night crowd?" They said, "Yes." One of my visions is to have that little plot of land you used to grow and invite the community. Right now, we have two community gardens in Riverdale under lock and key. I'd approached one of them and I said, "Listen, why doesn't the community come and grow?" He's like, "Oh, you know what's going to happen. It's going to get vandalized and it's the same old story, the fear. I just feel like there's so much fear and there's so many misconceptions on hunger and what we can all do together.

One of the things we would love to seek and we get that a lot at the fridge. When there's a situation when someone is not well, they need food, they're having a rough day, they want to tag your fridge to be able to call someone other than the 50th Precinct. I would love to be able to call, not 311, because by the time you answer all their questions, it's over.

Someone like a social worker, a social worker liaison at the 50th Precinct that you can trust or another group of people who are trained in mental illness and in-- I don't know. I don't exactly know, but we need something more.

Damon: We got to connect you to some of these other experiments is what's going to happen.

Selma: Yes, yes.

Damon: There's some folks you could call.

Selma: We really do because that's the next step. Right now, where food is concerned we're getting food. We have this great community of support coming out and helping, but that's the next step, growing food and having other-- Like even the space, I was thinking, we would love to have an area where we could help kids get jobs.

We have access to different things. Even having somebody sit there and help kids, like, look up these jobs that are available, but the kids don't even realize that it's, "Oh, it was posted over here." The postal system is hiring but some of the kids didn't even know about it. We happen to know about it, we had access to it, but there's so much more that needs to be done.

Sara: Damon, there was one interesting thing that happened, like we mentioned earlier, someone in the school system, she specializes in three and four-year-old. She's really close to the preschool world. One thing that just happened two years ago with level two.

Selma: Oh, yes.

Sara: The universal pre-K.

Selma: Yes, Pre-K.

Sara: They lowered the age to three years old, which means your three-year-old can sign up for this program. It's a preschool. They put up all these signs all over the MTA announcing that program, showed a whole bunch of pictures of brown and Black family and predominantly in the English language.

Selma: We did not see one sign in Spanish, all along the number one line.

Sara: We live in one of the most predominantly Spanish area. Putting that information, we did it as quickly as we could but didn't get it the turnout. 

Selma: It was still good.

Sara: The refrigerator is such a safe space for so many people, that if we have signed up next year that said, "Come to this day, we'll help you sign up," because navigating that portal is a nightmare. Much like if you don't speak English, you're screwed.

Selma: We registered family. We got one of the directors from a preschool to come in and help us. There's so many little things that need to be done and we could all do it together so easily, I don't know, if you had space and people, right?

Daniel: And capacity.

Selma: Don't ask that question. We have all these...

Damon: You have no idea how much I want to hear all of those things. I've so many reflections.

Selma: Only you, we can go crazy.

[Damon: There's a lot of synergy. You'll be surprised how many people are practicing in a similar way or have very similar aspirations. There's just so many takeaways, and I just want to name out loud because I get excited when I hear them. I want other people to make sure they hear what I'm hearing. One, one thing that you named that's important is again to go in deeper in some of these notions of scarcity and abundance.

There are actually a lot of resources that just general institutions offer that are not obvious, not evident. Even if they are "ADA accessible," not accessible to the people that need them. There's this other need of navigating available resources or "available resources." People might have even a caseworker or a case manager, but then you almost need a support service to manage your case management is something that I've seen in real-time for folks to help meet the needs that they actually have.

Another thing that y'all mentioned of a different level of first responders. I just want to give y'all something. I believe it's based off a model from Spokane, Washington, somewhere in Washington State. There's been a public investment in a new emergency response program that here in Chicago, folks have been advocating for a campaign called Treatment, Not Trauma, where we would take resources from the Chicago Police Department and actually invest into--

Well, mental health clinics were closed down pretty historically, but then also invest into mental health base first responders to mental health episodes because we don't have that right now. Look into that, there might be some like solidarity work that can happen in Chicago and New York.

One more thing I want to pull out from what you all said earlier about the hesitancy that you got from people and particularly people that ended up being your supporters. There's two things I just want people to hear from those stories. One, just the way in which people internalize capitalist ideology because I was asking, like, "Why were people saying it wouldn't work, and everything you said came back to ownership really?"

If no corporate entity owns it, it can't be maintained or protected, or someone will take it, which is then a property violation, which comes back to this capitalist notion of ownership. The fact that people can have an imagination for something that is publicly used and not owned in a private way is the way in which our systems are internalized and shrink our imagination.

Then secondly and most importantly, from your all story is you name so many people that maybe, without even realizing it, were transformed. Thinking about it abstractly, there was hesitancy, but then, when it was time to participate or when the infrastructure was there, now they're using the space that they own for something that is just for the people.

I just want people to receive that of, oftentimes, when you start, there's a lot of hesitancy or a lot of things that you can get discouraged by. What I hear from your experiment or from your example is, especially if your community engaged and entrenched, people who may have been hesitant or may not have been offering support when it is there will then come spilling in.

Don't allow that initial intimidation or hesitancy of people's understood injured consciousness because it's not really most people's fault, as we've been traumatized by the society we're in to only have a certain space to imagine. Those are some of the takeaways I got from all that y'all are sharing and-- they're awesome shit.

Selma: You make it sound so much better than we say it...

Damon: No, no, that's what you said. [chuckles]

Selma: No. We didn't say it, didn't sound all that good.

Sara: One thing that we did learn and it's a good thing and it can be somewhat-- I'm not going to use the word dangerous, but it can be-- Steven, maybe you can help me out here, because when you enter in a new space to do something new, pick one thing and do that thing very well. Meaning, for us it was food. We had a lot of people say, "Well, why don't you also do this? Why don't you also do this?"

Yes, we would love to do that. We would love to do all of those things but, right now, we're going to do this one thing very, very well, because we've done this thing very, very well and we've been consistent about it and consistent is key because consistent build trust. Because focus only on food and a few other things that were easy enough that clothing and book, we started to bring books into the fold from some of the school around here, they donate, "Well, can you put up bookshelves," so we get books and food.

If you try to expand too much, it becomes harder, unless you have the resources to do it. If you can just pick one or two things and just really hone in on those, it'd take off. That sounds like a capitalist view but it's not. It's basically, we realized that the system's broken and we have to break it even more to get it to do what we need to do.

Daniel: I love what you just said because, well one, I just think it's really good advice and we'll come back to that in a second. I think one of the things that you've illustrated to this whole conversation is, when you set out to do that one thing and that one thing well, there are certain needs that aren't that one thing that become immediately apparent. How many of the mutual aid projects started with food?

It's in our own experience, within five days, you're confronted with the realities of what does it mean for people to be on house, what does it mean for people to not have mental healthcare, what does it mean for people to not have physical healthcare, child care. Child care, that's the other big one. It's very easy in that moment when you see that need to feel like, "Oh, we have a responsibility to adapt to meet that need in real-time, regardless of whether we can or not."

The scaling up to try to meet that is a very understandable impulse, and can ultimately be really detrimental because what it does is it pulls the whole project to a space of trying to do something that it wasn't scaled to do in the first place.

Selma: That we experienced that.

Sara: Yes, we did.

Selma: We experienced that.

Daniel: Then, what happens for a lot of folks and has happened for me is, then you can't meet that need, and then you feel like you failed as opposed to understanding, "Oh, I was confronted with a reality that I wasn't able with the infrastructure that we built to meet that need. Now, how do we build the next experiment to more adequately meet this more expensive set of needs or how do we do two things or how do we do this one thing well in a way that directs people to the other people doing their one thing well."

That "failure" that brings the whole thing down when you know you can't meet the needs of thousands and thousands of people getting off the train or being around the park can be a really emotionally challenging reality to confront. I'm curious, does that ring true for y'all?

Sara: Damien, you haven't met Selma in person. She's the most convincing person.

Selma: That's a nice way to put it.

Sara: Yes. 

Selma: Yes.

Sara: Yes. She will get you to drive vegetables all over the place if you come here, so be careful.

Sara: Anyway. There's three of us now. Selma recruited Lily. Lily is pretty much now our full-time fridge maintainer. She's bilingual, which is key. Anyone that Selma doesn't know, Lily knows them. Anyone that Lily doesn't know, she knows. These two are a power team. All three of us have our soft spots.

To answer your question, Selma has her weak spots, and I shouldn't use the word weak. I should not use the word weak, because it's not a weakness. It's just more of someone that grabs your heart, and you want to go a little step further. Sometimes we do, it happens. It's just nature.

Lily is a badass, you've got to meet her. She's a badass, and you hear her talking, and you're like, "Oh, shit, I'm in trouble." She can spot someone a mile away. She'll see a kid walking down the street, 14 years old - everything fine and Lily will grab him and say, "Hey, get over here," and give him a sandwich and that's what he needed. She somehow knows that. She knows everyone on the street, so she has that X-ray vision.

I think all three of us have that profile. When we look at someone, we're like, "Oh shit, we've got to--" I'm not a teacher, but you have to stay away from the kids that trigger you, or people you work with, you've got to stay away from the ones that trigger you, or if you can help then do it, but do it with love and detachment.

Selma: Yes.

Sara: It's hard. It's really hard.

Selma: You can't take everyone home, and you can't fix everything, but together we can make those small changes. But initially, I remember when we first started, we were so clueless, and we became like, "Oh, we need another fridge over here. We need to get people over there. We need one on 238 Street. There's so much going on there." We failed at a couple of different things we were doing.

We were a part of this whole fridge Signal chat and people policing each other and correcting each other, and then we had to say, "You know what, sometimes we just have to go with just a small-- meeting the needs right here and now." We have no other big dreams.

I remember we won't name any names, but another group on the other side of the Bronx were like, "Let's part this and have 20 fridges all over," but it was all to just put it out there as a project. This is not a project. It's something that it means a lot to us and to everyone in the community. We were not about to do that.

Damon: What a tangible lesson is that, too big of a Signal chat could very quickly become counterpro--

Selma: Oh, you know that-

Selma: I just got out of every one of them. I'm like, "I--"

Damon: Oh, yes. I haven't opened Signal in about 15, 16 months for sure.

[01:03:12] Selma: Yes, so am I.

Damon: That was one of my boundaries I had to--

Selma: It was mine too. I was like, "I'm out of here." I learnt a lot because they had a lot to offer. They were doing a lot of activist work. They were doing a lot of eviction work.

Damon: Well-intended people, always. [chuckles] It's always very well-intended people. [chuckles]

Selma: Yes, and we can see. At one point, they reprimanded us like, "It's not just about food. This is not a band-aid." Yes, we know, but we can't spread ourselves anymore, and this is what we want to do. We can go out there and rally for that one family, or we can remain here looking for other stuff. You know what I mean?

Daniel: Truth is that we need all of it, and it doesn't all have to be the same people doing all of it.

Selma: Exactly.

Daniel: That's where the scale piece comes in.

Selma: Yes. That's it. We took a while to learn that, unfortunately. We can learn to let go and just remember, detach with love and continue.

Sara: Yes, Damien, what were you going to say?

Damon: I was going to say, I actually do have some language for exactly [chuckles] what we're talking about. We talk a lot about trying to counteract these logics of scarcity, in that the scarcity is engineered. It's orchestrated. It's organized scarcity, but that engineering and that organization does create real lack. With that, we think of abundance as the antidote to scarcity which is true, but our capacity is finite.

The language that I've worked on or thought of from these exact experiences you're naming is finite abundance, how do we honor that that we can get more than we need. There is not necessarily a shortage, but we're not infinite. We have capacity. We have bounds. We have limits, and so we are both end.

It's an attempt at thinking dialectically how do we honor our finite abundance of we don't have to come to it from a scarcity mindset, but we have to honor the reality of our humanity, our political reality of there is a system that is actively organizing to make sure that we don't meet people's needs and that affects our day to day functionality.

Yes, that's the way I think of it. If all people at all times did all things, we could do it, but right now, we don't quite have that, and that is enough. That is more than enough, but that still has its limits. It's not infinite, and usually, once you don't honor your real human capacity, people start to get hurt and things start to break. Then you reproduce the scarcity that we were counteracting in the first place. Finite abundance is how I think through this.

Selma: Why couldn't you have told us this seven months ago when we went through all that fuckery, right?

Damon: [chuckles] You wouldn't have got it the same way if you didn't go through the fuckery. You've got to hold it for the words to mean something. [chuckles] The fuckery is part of the equation. That's step three of the experiment.

Daniel: [laughs] We've replaced theories and methods with just fuck around and fuckery.

Sara: Yes. You know what? Damon, I want to touch upon something that you just said, "human capacity." What's interesting about this Signal trash is that I equate them a little bit to unclear politics. Where we all get on Google and we all get on--What'd you say?

Damon: I'm just exclaiming, I'm sorry. [chuckles] 

Sara: No, no, no. Everyone that feels free to take hotshots at each other on Signal because they have their own belief systems, and things get pretty testy. That's putting it lightly.

Sara: Deep down, each one of us are triggered by something. What is that thing? If you listen carefully, and don't open your mouth, and just let people talk, you learn so much. You'd find out that someone who's talking about, "This person, this person, this person," but if you listen and just let them talk and talk and talk, suddenly you're like, "Oh, that's where they're actually coming from, okay." So much of it is fear bait.

So many people have been hurt deeply, either through childhood experiences of abuse or lack of resources or neglect or whatever, and they grow up and want to make a difference. It's good that they have the space to make a difference, but sometimes they're not healed from past trauma and it comes out on this work.

On these Signal chats that we have together, it's a real space to learn, deeply. Everything can be extremely hurtful, and you have to be very, very vulnerable but in a smart way, because sometimes we can be our own worst enemies. Damien, what you said about human capacity, "What are we able to do?" Bring what you can and take what you need.

Damon: Yes.

Daniel: That sounds also like what you'd ask people to do with the fridge, bring what you can, take what you need. It's the same premise.

Damon: Yes, exactly. In this very sad dynamic of unhealed people showing up to work and, oftentimes, in addition to the material benefit, the work is about fulfilling something for a sense of self. The beauty to this notion of capacity, if we look at human beings, is that capacity is fluid. It changes from time to time.

At any given moment it is fixed, infinite, but going through these works and honoring it, in six months, you can do a bunch of pushups and become stronger, or you can go to a bunch of meetings and learn how to communicate with people better. In honoring the limits of our capacity, we can actually nurture and grow and become more capable to be in Signals together. I'm going to wait another five years of human evolution--

Daniel: [laughs] Before you get back.

Damon: -before I re-engage [laughs] with Signals. People need to do their healing in their own spaces, and I'll see y'all on the other side - transformation. That has been my boundary. [laughs]

Selma: Yes.

Sara: One thing that we've noticed at the fridge over time is that, because the refrigerator has been there for so long, in the initial stages, we had a lot of people taking everything, the scarcity mindset. But because it's been so consistent, those same people, we know who they are, they come and just take a few things every day, every other day. They just take a few things because they know it's there. They feel safe now, they know that they have it.

Damon: Yes. Just learnings, right? Even in that, not only are you obviously benefiting those people, not only is it the consistency, I also see that as then an investment in community. Not only did you change someone's life in that they ate food, but now they see their behavior linked to other people's fate and outcome. The learning of, if I take a little bit less or if I don't gauge this or if I'm not hoarding this, I'm in better relationship to my community of fellow human beings. That type of stuff is the naming of people's capacity changing, so that's really beautiful.

Sara: There's another part of that, that they had less shame.

Selma: Yes.

Sara: We had a lot of people come and have outbursts of anger, and just find out that they didn't feel good about the fact that they felt like they needed that. Now, it's more about, "Oh, we have tomatoes and zucchini, come grab some." "Oh, okay, thank you." Less shame, so much less shame.

Selma: Yes, and it's changed. It's changed a lot.

Sara: Yes, the conversation has changed.

Selma: I think the fact that now, as the fridge has gotten more popular or people are aware of it, food banks are able to give us food through another source. Food banks have been tasked to really address these issues, but they've become more of a social service agency and not really looking at hunger. I think once food relief is out of the hands of profits and corporate structures then more into preventative medicine maybe, we will get better food.

We don't need two pallets of fennel because nobody else needed it, so you send it to the freaking Bronx, you send it to us. We don't need fennel, no one is eating fennel over this side here and you can tell them that.

Sara: Remember when we--

[01:11:03] Selma: What else did we get? Potato flakes, 800 boxes. That's the problem that exists where, when corporations get a tax deduction to give it to a food bank that in turn looks to send it to somewhere else, it doesn't work to address real hunger, it doesn't. We use donations to buy fresh produce when we can. We ask for fresh produce because that's what the communities need.

What has happened now is that we are getting food, because we are relentless in asking for food. We will call people, we will email people.

Damon: For the listeners at home, there's been a very clear who that we is. [laughs]

Selma: Like yesterday, we were having a community get-together. The whole community came up with food. They brought food, we were hanging out at the fridge. I called someone from Hunts Point. We had approached them a year ago, and we got no response, but last week when we said, "I'm wondering if you can give us a couple of 100 pounds of oranges or anything actually," because we appreciate fruit. We never get fruit from food banks, and they sent it over.

I think what's changed their role is that people know there's going to be food there every day. We couldn't guarantee that last year. We were really hustling for everything and it was hard. Now, people are bringing food and places are calling us and saying, "Oh yes, we've got a lot of extra plantains. Do you want them? Can you send someone?" I think that's shifted a lot.

Sara: She just used the word plantain. In our neighborhood, we have a mixture of Arabic, Irish, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Indian.

Selma: West African also.

Sara: -and West African. Their staples and each of their diet, there's definitely some overlap but there's some difference there. We try very hard to ask for those staple - not fennel or extra--

Selma: Dandelion greens.

Sara: Nobody wants them. When folks see food that is relative to what they normally eat, it's so much more relevant to what they are looking for as opposed to what they are receiving as a handout.

Damon: Yes, and that's a huge culture thing.

Sara: That helps take the shame down.

Damon: The cultural and communal relevancy of it makes it feel like more of an offering than, as you named, a handout.

Daniel: Than what's been discarded or what's left at the end, yes.

Selma: Right. There are a couple of things that really need to change, but we don't have the political background or the accounting background, but really, food banks should say, "We don't want this shit that you're sending us, this is not good. You're not going to give it to your family. Don't send this to us and get a tax write-off, throw it out so that you won't buy from the manufacturer again."

No, they'll send it and we end up seeing it brought to the fridge now. It's a hard thing to say no to food but I was like, "800 boxes of potato flakes. We don't want them. Send it back to the company. Give us a donation or give us something else, don't send this here." That whole thing, there should be some system where really food banks say, "No, we're not going to take this. This is not healthy food. We don't want it. Why do you think that poor people in the Bronx or hungry people need this stuff?"

Sara: For sure thing, the food bank, they're making a salary, they're making a paycheck and so they're not going to fight back. When you look at the USDA boxes there--

Selma: Don't even talk about those.

Damon: No, let's talk about it a little bit.

Selma: You know about the Farmers to Families boxes, right? Millions of dollars.

Damon: For context, could you just briefly describe what it is?

Selma: Okay. Right at the heights of the pandemic, Trump signs this thing, "I'm going to help farmers, I'm going to help people." I can't give you all the details, it's too much. Basically, corporations were given millions of dollars. If you look up the numbers, you will be stunned. They were tasked to produce these boxes because they were saving the farmers in giving food out, but it was such a shit show.

We were really moving-- these were like 25 boxes or 35 boxes of dairy, of protein, and vegetables. They chose vegetables that were not even-- they were okay. I don't want to sound like a complainer, but we were moving those boxes every week, sometimes twice a week. We were thankful for them because it's better than nothing, but the scam that went on with them.

One person in Texas who got the contract, for example, it was maybe 4 million. He wasn't even a food provider. He was an event planner who probably knew the right people. That was happening and they were giving us these chickens that were horrible, it was just glue in them. We were handling it, giving it out, not at the fridge because we also volunteered a pantry.

Those Farmers to Families boxes, it ended now, thank God. It was such a scam. It was so awful, the money that was spent, and the USDA right alongside there. There were a lot that was happening that is no longer happening to that scale, but that was really unfortunate. We had to learn all these things, that we would get these boxes to give out and I was thinking, "My God, if you don't want to feed your children this or your family, why are we giving this out?"

I don't want to sound righteous but somebody said to me, "Oh, but I like it. I don't mind it, I have nothing." Then we have to backtrack and say, "You're right, you're right. It's okay." The meals and blocks of cheese that was-- I'm not even going to go there.

Damon: Once you bring up that federal program with also how the city pantries are working, what I hear you naming is the way in which the state doesn't just fail to address hunger, but in many ways are actively sustaining it. The way in which governments and corporations collaborate through nonprofit capitalism in our state structure, you named it, it's peoples millions of dollars and these grants, people's salaries.

There was a corporate entity in maintaining these systems that are not actually addressing the issue and addressing people's lives and the way that you're able to see on the ground day to day basis. One of the things that Miriam--

Damon: -said in our intro episode of language that we want to use more is the work that's needed and the things that people are doing is unresourced, it's not just under-resourced. The type of work that is so important, such as this fridge and other mutual aid projects gets literally pennies on the dollar, or nothing relative to these multi-million-- almost like borderline Ponzi schemes that are sustaining the issue.

We say the nonprofit industrial complex, were like, I'm doing my air quotes right now, as this like "abstract monster" but the way that you're naming these failures or these bureaucratic lacks of quality is really making clear how the nonprofit space is particularly showing up around food, work and hunger.

Sara: Let me ask you a question. If you gave your son or daughter $100 and told him go to the grocery store, and they came home with a bag full of potato chips, Cheetos, fruit boxes or fruit juice boxes, maybe even a few vegetables. The receipt says $26 and you asked him, "What happened with the other $74? What is all this shit? - what happened. It was supposed to be $100 and you got $26 worth of stuff that--"

Selma: Yes.

Damon: You're supposed to be dealing with it at cost if you're going straight to the manufacturer so that shouldn't even be with the retail markup.

Selma: Yes,

Sara: Exactly.

Damon: [sighs] Bad things. [laughs]

Selma: Lots of bad things.

Daniel: Can we go back to the generative things that you all - in response to this, and not even necessarily in response, just what this has turned into? I think what we've heard throughout this whole conversation is the transformation that's existed for the two of y'all and the other participants, not to mention the business owner next door or the people getting off the train.

One of the goals of this show is to activate folks to build their own experiments and not to replicate exactly what you've done, this isn't replicable everywhere, but to use it as a jumping-off point. We've heard some of them but what are some of the tools that y'all now have in your toolbox that you maybe didn't when you started, that you would want someone else who's about to go hop on Craigslist to find a fridge? What's something you would want them to have in their toolbox?

Selma: Patience.

Sara: Patience in building a community. That and the community show up in the way that they can.

Selma: Realizing it's not us, it's the whole community. You could walk there today and people will say, "Oh, who put this fridge out?" It's everyone, it's everyone's fridge. It's everyone's fridge." Lily is there, Louis is there, Jose is there and it's everyone's fridge and they have full ownership of it. If someone wants to do a drive, any of them would say, "Oh, yes, bring out your tables. You can do a drive."

They don't need to ask us. They don't need to talk to us. It's not our fridge, it's everyone's fridge. Initially, it was a little leap where it was like, "Oh, well, Selma and Sara asked them." I'm like, "No, it's your fridge. Is it a good idea? Let's do it." Yesterday was a beautiful day where people just brought things, brought games, brought music and we all hung out, but it was wonderful to see this fridge powered by the community.

Sara: I think if you can figure out a way to be consistent, that will help maintain the sustainability of the project. For instance, fundamentally that refrigerator needs to be cleaned, to find the system that can support those fundamental needs and let everything else evolve naturally, identify the MVP.

Now, I'm starting to sound like a corporate person, because I do work in the corporate, but it's MVP. If you can find that minimal viable product and figure out a way to maintain and sustain that and let everything else grow from it, be willing to receive feedback, be willing to be wrong. You have to be willing to be wrong because you will be wrong so many times.

Damon: You might as well be willing.

Selma: Yes.

Damon: You've got to be wrong regardless so you work up some will for it.

Selma: One of the big things is we can be a control freak, no control freaks in the movement. You've got to be able to know that this is a joint effort. Everyone's doing their part and you can control the outcome.

Damon: I might be a chaos freak.

Daniel: Is there anything else that y'all want to make sure this conversation includes before we get out of here?

Sara: Oh my God. I don't want to sound cliché, I really don't, but the system really is broken in fundamental ways that I never imagined. If you sit down and think about it, you can get really, really sad and really depressed in a bad way. If you can just find one way to help, it gets a little better, it does help.

Damon: That's so true because, just in locating your power, that is healing, to then - your name that is so true, especially in this information age where it can just come in waves of all of the dysfunction and destruction and dehumanization, but then once you are able to locate even the smallest level of impact, that does something to your own humanity.

Even if you're not saving the world, because none of us actually will, you can actually save yourself a little bit, but be accountable to that and understanding that it can't just be a self-serving project and you can't blow up on people in signals to make yourself feel better. You could start to feel better by doing the good work when you show up. I definitely have learned that and have felt that and received that.

Sara: We have a guy who did a Burger King and not far from the refrigerator. This guy come to the refrigerator every day and put a waffle in because he buys one and gets one free. Every day.

Selma: Every day.

Sara: That's the point. He's making someone happy.

Damon: The daily waffle dinner-

Selma: He does.

Damon: - which then means every day somebody's eating a free waffle. [laughs]

Selma: Yes, yes.

Daniel: Do you know what we might call that? That would be a happy meal.

Selma: That's right.

Selma: No.

Daniel: Folks, this episode's been sponsored by Burger King. [laughs] No, of course.

Damon: Thank you so much.

Daniel: Thank you all so much.

Selma: Thank you. This has been good for us too. It's like an honest conversation, not typical. Thank you both.

Damon: That's what we promised.

Daniel: Such a joy to learn from you. How can folks find the work of the fridge in the ways you want to be found?

Sara: If we go to Instagram and look up The Friendly Fridge BX, you'll find us. We also have a Facebook page, same thing, but Instagram seems to be where it's at. You can email us at thefriendlyfridgebx@gmail.com, ask us any questions whatsoever. We love ideas. If you have ideas, throw them our way, that's what we need more than anything.

Damon: For people who are listening who can't get close to the Bronx, do your work to see if there're a fridge near you, to see if you can take some of these lessons and contribute some of this knowledge from the experience from the BX to where you are because this is a movement of mutual aid-based work that is really important and it's happening all over.

It might be closer to you already than you realize, and if it's not, what an opportunity. Please support Friendly Fridge BX, and if you can't support it by being a partner in this work and do your thing where you are.

Selma: Thank you.

Sara: Thank you.

Damon: Thank you. Thank you so, so, so much.

Damon: All right. Now, let's check the notes, let's get into the observations. Let's debrief. Let's get into the peer review if we may.

Damon: Again, all of the things I remember from cheating in my science class. Eva, you're back with us, what are some of the takeaways? What are some of the high points? What are some of the learnings or things you want to direct the listeners' ear back to from what you were hearing?

Eva: There's so much. What a rich conversation. I look forward to talking to Selma and Sara again someday in front of the fridge I hope. I think, for me, just to go back to the theme, I loved it that they said, "We just went with our gut. We just jumped into this experiment." That can be a little misleading because, obviously, Selma and Sara didn't just jump into the Bronx and stick a fridge out in front of a store.

These are people who had a solid community base building up to this point, but it was so refreshing, and so just enlightening to hear people talk about what the experience of seeing a need in their community, jumping into action in a way that I think a lot of people might say, "Oh, that's too quick. You didn't focus group it, you didn't talk to ever everyone. You didn't go through these hoops that we've created for ourselves to 'make a good project or make a responsible project.'"

They knew that they had something to offer and they knew that it was worth a try. Seeing how their evolution of thought about the way that they were doing the work, what the work was doing for the community, who it was for and who was invited in, was just I think really brilliant and such a great example of how you're building the plane as you fly it.

It's something that Maryam brought up in our first episode for this series too, that we make mistakes. Selma and Sara talk about having a charity mindset or a charity model at the get-go and how that really evolved to opening their eyes about food waste, about food pantries, about the nonprofit industrial complex, and the systems afoot in the work that they're doing about what it means to focus on just one area, even though you have lots of people and needs and information flying at you from all angles.

I think that those threads that Sara and Selma take out about the history, learning about the shoulders they stand on, creating this project as it goes, creating with input from the people around them, applies not just for friendly fridges or this type of experiment, but all of the experiments that we're documenting at million experiments.

Damon: Absolutely. I think, one, those are just some rich takeaways. I got lost and I'm like, "Wow, you did some really good listening." [laughs]

Daniel: You took some shit away.

Damon: I think the word that you said very early on that resonated for what was so enjoyable about the conversation was evolution, because this type of mutual aid public space fridge work is emerging and happening throughout many communities, but it was really exciting to talk to folks who did not start from a solid established ideological position.

It wasn't like, "Hey, we're the capital A abolitionists team out here doing this abolitionist work," that it started from a place that was well-intended, but to be able to track and in real-time here and learn and dissect the transformations that I think are much more useful for most people, most people are trying to get from, "How do I get from this place of I know things aren't right and want to do good, to being more confident in these claims of a new world that are not yet like visible to me yet?"

To hear their experience of starting from wanting to get support from the police station to then having this abolitionist practices and that it took young people and family to be provoked and real learning that had to happen to get to the richness of how they're understanding their project now was really exciting and really, I think, a great opportunity.

The fact, I just want to toss to you Daniel, of we do so much Chicago conversation on this show and I think, in a lot of abolitionist discourse, it was really exciting also to hear the place-based activation of some of your home and in your community connections to this space.

Daniel: This is part of my grand scheme to slowly but surely make all of our work Bronx-based without anybody realizing. No, it was so cool to get to talk about the spaces that I've grown up around and the tensions and contradictions and fault lines and disparities that are the things that informed how I see the world.

I didn't grow up in a Chicago context. Segregation doesn't look the same there. Socioeconomic division doesn't operate the same at 242nd street. as it does on 79th. Getting to put it in that context was really cool. Then a couple of weeks after we recorded this before we were recording the intro to be home around the Thanksgiving holiday and go and get to see the fridge in action was really, really exciting.

It wasn't just on Instagram, there it was under the train and there were people putting food in and people taking food out. In some ways, that was really inspiring to me as someone who's really found their way into this work being somewhere else, other than home. It was a good reminder of the importance of doing this in the spaces that you call home and in some ways, encourage me, I think, to start thinking again about what does it mean to do that on the streets and neighborhoods that I actually spend most of my time in here in Chicago.

I think that kind of transformation that we talked about for the two of them happens best on that scale. It didn't just happen for them. It happened for the people who would pass by and took all the food at the beginning because they thought it would disappear and then it was there the next day, and so they could take what they needed.

It happened for people who didn't trust food pantries because they were worried that their undocumented status would make that harder and that transformation happened for the shopkeeper next door. I loved that part of what they talked about because I think it shows the difference between bringing someone an idea and bringing someone an experiment.

People are so resistant to a new idea that challenges them. They're much less resistant to something in practice in action, something happening that they can see with their own eyes. That's what I think changes so many people's minds and how they move through the world much more. It's ironic because we're here just talking about ideas in some ways, but I think it's much more effective.

You go, "Hey, we're doing this thing," versus, "Hey, I had this idea about this thing." To hear that shopkeeper not just be transformed in his thoughts, but also in his actions and for him to be participating, seems like a really great example of what we're hoping these experiments accomplish. Eva, anything else that jumped out to you?

Eva: I think talking about that example that Selma and Sara gave about the people who came to the fridge early on and took everything because no one was sure yet if this was a resource that was going to continue to exist and certainly there are examples of fridges in these programs that have not continued to exist throughout the pandemic.

I think part of this experiment and looking at this model in the Bronx is interrogating what worked and what didn't work over this course of this year. I really love a piece that Damien has pulled out consistently about abundance, about finite abundance. It's not that we live in between these two poles of scarcity and abundance when we're imagining the world that we want to live in, the transition in getting there means something.

Selma and Sara said, "Sometimes you have to just not talk about it, sometimes you just have to do it and you have to learn as you do it." That also meant learning the capacity of the community and the people who could engage in the project, the people who maybe should engage in the project, and making a lot of those decisions on the fly. One of the ways that they describe the fridges, bring what you can, take what you need and I wonder if that applies to more than just the food.

Damon: Exactly, this notion of finite abundance has really helped me relate to people in trying to talk about things that seem imaginary. What we have to have is a relationship between the material and the ideal or the real and the potential and those things are always informing each other.

For a lot of people, when you just say abundance, when they are not experiencing abundance, it can become very liberal or very patronizing if you're not very specific or contextual. A thing that I think abolition requires is we have to simplify our experiences and complicate our thinking. We just need people to have food, have water, do the basic things, but we also need to get beyond the either or of how we're taught to think, the way we are taught to simplify the world based off what power demands.

In that, the earth produces bounty, but people experience shortage. People are powerful, but we also are holding trauma and, if we separate those realities or those truths, it can be very hard to communicate to people about how do you then create a new world. I think it's important to name both or to be a corny lefty, be dialectic about how we look at reality, honestly, to give folks to make those next jumps.

To get back to the concrete, what we're talking about, the way people hear the conversation about abolition, and I'm understanding this more and more is, do we make changes to the things as they are or do we have nothing? To get people out of that either or or to think of, do we want to make marginal changes to how they are or start creating a new thing, we have to change the approach to thought and change the approach to communication and complicate our thinking a little bit.

Daniel: It's a lot easier to do that when you're not hungry.

Damon: Exactly.

[01:35:21] Daniel: My thoughts get so much simpler when I'm hungry.

Damon: Exactly, and it is that simple.

Daniel: Well, I think we did it. I think we peer-reviewed and now, listeners, it is your turn. We are asking you to share with us on socials or email millionexperiments@gmail.com. What are the gems? What are the pieces from this conversation that jumped out to you? What are the tools that you're going to put in your abolitionist toolbox? What are the pieces of this experiment that are shifting or changing the way you think about your own work and way to being in the world?

Damon: You Know what? Off the fly, I'm going to add another assignment. I talked so much about how I was bad at homework and look at me, I'm giving more homework. In addition to responding to One Million Experiments and AirGo about what you took away, this medium is intended to be interactive and we need community.

Share your learnings or share what you heard with someone else, someone else who's questioning these ideas, someone else who you want to introduce to a new way of being or a new world. Don't just peer review back to us. Peer review with your peers, go find some peers out here.[chuckles]

Daniel: If you want to record those reflections and those peer reviews as a voice memo on your phone, you can always share those with us and maybe we'll do a peer review reflection episode of the show. If something jumps out, just take out your phone, record a little voice memo, and you can email that little audio file over to us.

Damon: Send that bad boy over.

Daniel: Come on, why not? Make it a pod. That's our new slogan, make it a pod.

Damon: Which is at your phone. Go make your pod and then make it a pod.

Daniel: Make it a pod and then make it a pod.

Daniel: Eva on that, just unnecessary but beautiful wordplay. How can folks find One Million Experiments and I see and all that in the ways that you all would like to be found?

Eva: You can always find One Million Experiments at millionexperiments.com. You can access our zine collection the entire database of experiments we've collected and the podcast there. You can also share your projects. For interrupting criminalization, you can follow us on social at interrupt crim.

Daniel: We're at AirGo Radio everywhere on socials, airgoradio.com. Make sure you subscribe to both AirGo and One Million Experiments wherever you get your podcast. Just type those words in and our voices will pop up, and I think that'll do it. We'll be back next month exploring, learning from and showcasing another experiment.

Damon: Much love to the people.

Daniel: Peace.