Free fridges, though few, stand between New York families and hunger

NEW YORK CITY - The refrigerator on Second Avenue in East Harlem, fortunately, is always open for hungry families in need.  

Adah Carrion is one of those, along with local food pantries, responsible for keeping it stocked up.

"Every other day, we can have people pick up for us, or however we can get it over here. We try our best," Carrion shared with FOX 5 NY.

It’s a part of the In Our Hearts organization's network of roughly 40 to 60 community fridges across the city, aimed at reducing food waste, addressing food insecurity and community organizing.

At the start of the pandemic, helping hands were a supply in surplus.

"During the pandemic, a lot of people had a lot of free time. A lot of the people we were working with, a lot of the organizers were maybe people who their jobs weren’t happening," said Thadeus Umpster, a community fridge organizer with In Our Hearts.

But work started coming back and the workers went with it, leaving some fridges abandoned on city streets without volunteers tending to them.

A fridge tracker on the organization's website lists about 165 fridges, but not all of them are accounted for.

"Sometimes a fridge would be on there twice, like the Bushwick fridge was on like one corner of Broadway and Covert, and it moved over to a new location," Umpster explained.

The volunteer tracking them and translating that info to the website hasn’t been on top of the changes, he said, but hunger remains a constant need to address.

According to hunger relief organization Feeding America, 1 in 10 New Yorkers, or 1.8 million, struggles with hunger, and nearly 600,000 of them are children.

"We’re in the middle of a food drought where it’s hard for people to get healthy foods, so we try our best to give the fruits and vegetables and all of that good stuff," said Carrion.

The fridges, though few, stand tall between families and hunger.

"We’d love to see more people get involved. We’d love to see more people step up in their own communities and start organizing community fridges and organizing food distribution in mutual aid," Umpster added.

LINK: For more about In Our Hearts and their initiative to address hunger, visit: https://www.inourheartsnyc.org/