Communication Currents

New Series, Vol. 1, No. 5 

Mutual aid, or informal, radical care work performed by interdependent community members, emphasizes solidarity over charity and can help combat state and institutional neglect in the face of crisis, catastrophe, and critical classed, raced, gendered, and ableist infrastructure gaps. Historically, the practice of mutual aid can be traced to various anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial groups and practices including African American cooperative economics, Indigenous water protectors, and The Black Panther Party. Importantly, mutual aid is not without risk and organizers may even face criminalization and coordinated infiltration.  

Neoliberal restructuring of the U.S. nonprofit sector has rendered many state agencies as “policing bodies” rather than service providers, necessitating an alternative approach to food justice through mutual aid.  Community fridges are a form of mutual aid that supports free food access via “24/7” public pantries and refrigerators maintained by networked collectives. Community fridges are an effective way to circumvent barriers typically associated with state -sanctioned means of combatting food insecurity (e.g., food banks), but also are a source of public pedagogy that challenges neoliberal capitalist beliefs of scarcity, individualism, and meritocracy, illuminates the practice of mutual aid, and invites others to contribute to and organize around food justice.  

Community fridge organizing online gained popularity during the onset of the pandemic and often began with the work of a single individual but later scaled to large, non-hierarchical networks of hundreds or thousands of individuals donating, stocking, and cleaning fridges over time. Organizers often use social media to promote donations and events, raise awareness through storytelling, recruit additional volunteers, and connect community members with other related resources. Constance Gordon qualitatively analyzed 20 community fridge Instagram accounts from the U.S. and Canada from 2020-2023 and how their organizers used social media to facilitate improvisational food justice, disrupt dominant food charity discourses, and communicate ongoing challenges to organizing.  

The Instagram accounts analyzed were from community fridge projects in various locations, most in cities or adjacent suburbs, with amounts of followers ranging from 1,000 to over 20,000 and a total of over 5,000 individual posts subject to analysis. Gordon found that community fridge organizers disrupted harmful charity discourses of scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance by juxtaposing their work to already existing institutional food assistance and nonprofit food banks and pantries.  

The belief that food is a scarce commodity was disrupted by celebrating food abundance through frequent posts of community fridges filled with a variety of fresh ingredients and prepared meals that were freely available to all. A post by Marin Community Fridges featured a photo of a fully stocked fridge with the caption, “There is an ABUNDANCE of food on this planet. No one should be hungry.” Another account, Fort Greene Community Fridge, posted a photo of a pantry that had been filled with packaged goods discarded by a local school with the caption, “Reminder: Scarcity isn’t the problem. All of these unexpired & sanitary foods were being thrown out. SO MUCH FOOD! ... We carried the bags to the fridge and unloaded the bounty #ScarcityIsAMyth.” 

Organizers helped their followers unlearn saviorism by educating them about the root causes of food insecurity and affirmed that food is a right rather than a privilege, encouraging solidarity. For example, Funky Town Fridge explained how “Anti-Black capitalism, systemic racism, and oppression in the form of zoning codes, lending practices, and other discriminatory policies rooted in Anti-Blackness" created a food apartheid that systematically denies people of color access to nutritious and affordable food. Others linked resources from mutual aid experts, like Dean Spade and Peter Kropotkin, and other reading material about the role of mutual aid in social justice organizing more broadly.  

Community fridge organizers also asked volunteers to critically reflect on their own implicit biases against food insecure communities and related impulses to police community fridge goers through surveillance and questioning. Policing at fridges, in fact, was explicitly discouraged on most accounts and some even offered guidelines or shared agreements to promote respect, autonomy, and agency. An infographic series posted by Los Angeles Community Fridges, for example, said: 

DO NOT POLICE AT THE FRIDGES […] Please do not insert or intervene yourself into anyone’s actions at a community fridge, unless you see that they are actively causing harm to another individual […] Do not attempt to regulate a system for people coming to collect from the fridges by making people form lines or limiting how many items people can take. People coming to the fridge should be able to come and go as they please and take as much as they need. 

Unfortunately, organizers often encountered challenges such the ongoing dumping of trash, boxes, and raw perishables and the dwindling of volunteer support resulting in all labor of sustaining on a small number of—or even just one—individuals, leading to organizer burnout and sometimes temporary or permanent closure of the community fridge. Although posts on these accounts would often receive a lot of digital support in the form of likes and shares, tangible support was harder to come by. One organizer wrote, “The truth is, everybody wants to be an activist till it’s time for action ... the frontline is lonely.” To discourage dumping of unwanted items, organizers framed care as an iterative practice that involves listening to the needs of others rather than the mere gifting of anything excess and also encouraged community to clean up around the area when visiting the fridge.  

This piece demonstrates how creative care networks are effective means of educating the public on how to collectively combat systemic issues by positioning community fridges as a tool in the fight against food insecurity. It is also one of the first communicative investigations of food justice and offers insights into combatting organizing tensions, setbacks, and conflict. Practically, organizing around food justice via mutual aid practices such as community fridges can ultimately disrupt the harm of scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance, lower food access barriers, and foster connections among food secure entities to redistribute surplus food that would otherwise be thrown away as waste.  

Communication Currents Discussion Questions 

1. What is mutual aid and how is it different from charity? Why is it important for volunteers to reflect on their implicit biases when participating in mutual aid efforts?  
2. What can we learn from community fridge organizers about resilience and adaptability in social justice work? 
3. Reflect on a time when public pedagogy changed your perspective on a social issue. What made it effective, and how did it influence your actions or beliefs? What innovative approaches to public pedagogy have you seen or can you imagine being effective in today’s digital and social landscape? 

For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Constance Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. 

This essay, by R. E. Purtell, translates the scholarly journal article, Constance Gordon (2024): Learning mutual aid: food justice public pedagogy and community fridge organizing online, in the Journal of Applied Communication Research, 52(2): 158–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2024.2327417  

 2024 National Communication Association

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