AUSTIN (KXAN) — Hundreds of people rely on the six free community fridges that ATX Free Fridge, a mutual aid project aiming to fight food insecurity and food waste, has placed around Austin. Now, one of those will permanently close because of issues that organizers said ultimately came from a lack of support.
The 2nd Street Fridge, located at 1710 E 2nd St, Austin, TX 78702, was the second fridge that ATX Free Fridge opened. The mutual aid’s Instagram made a post on Sept. 30 announcing that the fridge was permanently closing, and the last day of operations would be Oct. 10.
“For five years, this fridge offered care and nourishment to neighbors, but we couldn’t keep it going without steady community support.” the post caption said. “Despite our efforts, trash piled up and we were asked to leave. This is a reminder that every fridge belongs to the whole community and each of us has a part to play in keeping the fridges clean and stocked.”
Stephanie Castleberry, one of about four organizers with ATX Free Fridge, said they started having issues around community care for the fridge.
“So, trash will tend to pile up. The shelves have been taken quite a few times. We’re just having a hard time with getting enough people engaging regularly, enough to kind of prevent these issues from piling up,” Castleberry said. “You know, a box leads to food, and then the food leads to critters. I mean, it just kind of can snowball really quickly.”
(KXAN Photo/Abigail Jones)
ATX Free Fridge was founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kellie Stewart, another organizer, said it started with a few people who were laid off from working in the food industry during the pandemic, but they still wanted to feed people, and they took inspiration from other free fridge organizations around the country and started one in Austin.
“It’s as simple as it sounds,” she said. “People can give and take food whenever they want. No need to sign up, and each location is quite busy. They see between 100 to 200 people every day, at each location.”
Castleberry and Stewart emphasized the need for community support for projects like ATX Free Fridge.
“We see that successful mutual aid projects that have really robust community support, and unfortunately, this one just was not getting enough support,” Stewart said. “There’s only four of us, like admin organizers for ATX Free Fridge, so there’s no way that we could keep up with the hundreds and hundreds of people that go to each location every day. So we really need help from the community to keep these fridges stocked and clean.”
The organizers also highlighted some of their other fridge locations and praised the efforts of one in particular, using it as an example of how community members can step forward and help with the initiative.
Castleberry said Brentwood Social House actually reached out to ATX Free Fridge about hosting a community fridge at the cafe.
“They give it care. Every single day, they go check it out, see what’s going on with it, clean it up,” she said in reference to the cafe’s staff and the nearby community.
“And that location is regularly stocked, and it’s regularly clean,” Stewart added. “It always looks good and feels good because that neighborhood has really taken collective ownership of it.”
Stewart said another organizational challenge has been a sense of permission that she thinks folks feel they need before helping with the fridge.
(KXAN Photo/Abigail Jones)
“We truly need members of the community to take more ownership,” she said. “You know, they don’t necessarily have to go through us. I think that’s a really common thing that we run into, is people are waiting for us to say, ‘yes, you can,’ or, ‘you do this exact thing,’ when we really just need more people doing something, anything, you know.”
Those asks can add weight to another struggle the organizers face: capacity. Castleberry said that since the mutual aid project’s main organizers also work jobs and lead their own lives, it can sometimes be hard to keep up with everything, and their capacity can vary depending on what’s going on.
“That’s the other thing that’s different from us versus nonprofits… we are just regular ol’ folks doing our day jobs, and this is what we do in the free time,” Castleberry said.
Castleberry said ATX Free Fridge is trying to expand its circle of organizational leadership, “which really does include everybody,” she said. She also acknowledged that it can feel intimidating to figure out where to start, but one option is showing up to the project’s community meetings, which occur every six weeks or so.
The project’s Instagram post, and Castleberry and Stewart, magnified the need for collective care, noting that the lack of collective care is the root of what led to the closure of the 2nd Street fridge.
“If you believe in what these fridges provide, we need you to show up. Drop off food when you can and take a moment to tidy. Without collective care, this could happen to other locations too,” the post caption read. “If you’d like to honor the years of service this location provided to our community, please put it on your calendar to drop off some food and/or clean any fridge location 💛”
ATX Free Fridge already posted signs at the 2nd Street Fridge about its closure and said they’d like to eventually add another free fridge in the area, but they haven’t identified any locations for one yet. But a new one will be opening in the Montopolis area in the next few months, Stewart said.
Anyone interested in helping support the community fridges can drop off food at any location, any time. People can also sign up to clean the fridges, or reach out to ATX Free Fridge at atxfreefridge@gmail.com for more information about other forms of involvment.
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