Story by Eliza Benbow
Cover Photo by Danielle Hart
A new door is opening for food access in North Durham, and it leads to a refrigerator that is available to the public 24/7.
The third fridge and pantry stocked and maintained by organizers and volunteers with Durham Community Fridges is expected to be moved into its new home, a shelter that sits in front of Omie’s Coffee Shop and Roastery on North Roxboro Street, on April 7.
DCF is a mutual aid group that provides Durham residents with access to fresh, free food through outdoor community fridges that are open at all hours, every day of the week. The group follows a mutual aid model, where resources are exchanged among community members for mutual benefit.
Visitors to each fridge can provide updates about its status through an online database that keeps track of its cleanliness and fullness, but the fridges are otherwise intentionally unmonitored.
“It’s really important to allow people who are engaging with the fridge to engage with dignity and not feeling shame, and that’s part of it – it being open whenever,” Sharmîn Aziz, a DCF community organizer, said.
In 2022, nine community members started the first fridge at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church on West Main Street. The following year, a second fridge opened at Part & Parcel, located in the south of Durham.
Since then, the group has expanded into a network of volunteers and organizers who fill the fridges and pantries with everything from fresh fruits and vegetables to loaves of bread and cooked meals.
Keeping with the principles of mutual aid, neighbors can bring surplus food from their kitchens or gardens to the fridge, which distributes the resources and prevents food waste. Sometimes people have even taken ingredients from the fridge home to cook a meal that they then return to the fridge for others to take home, Aziz said.
The fridges are also consistently filled by other mutual aid groups, grocery stores and local businesses.
One not-for-profit group, Bagging It 4 Kids (B4K), has food pantries in various Durham public schools and contributes to fridges and pantries across the city, including DCF’s fridges.
The concept for B4K came to Ginger Allison when she was volunteering at a free program with the American Dance Festival in 2015 and overheard a child tell another volunteer that “it wasn’t my day to eat today.”
Those words, and Allison’s desire to be a part of a solution, became her inspiration.
Through #DurhamEats2024, a coalition established last year by Allison and fellow B4K organizer Doreen Opinya, B4K has contributed to a wider network of food distribution events and opportunities, including monthly summer cookouts that each drew over 200 attendees.
Opinya runs B4K’s social media accounts and said that the integration of #DurhamEats2024 drew dozens of volunteers who showed up to community cookouts and food distributions, eager to contribute.
“There was a lot of excitement from new volunteers because they really were interested in mutual aid and wanted to do something and make a difference in their community,” Opinya said. “And I was just happy that we could be the venue that people could do these things through.”
According to B4K’s social media, groups involved in #DurhamEats2024, such as B4K, DCF and Root Causes — a group based at Duke University that works to distribute healthy food within the community — redistributed 57 tons of food that would have been otherwise wasted over the course of the year.
This network of food distribution groups often works together to increase access to fresh food and reduce food waste.
Over the course of several workdays in recent months, volunteers and organizers from B4K and Root Causes joined DCF at Omie’s to help construct a shelter for the new fridge.
Equipped with saws, hammers and drills, laminated blueprints, work gloves and a pile of donated plywood, the group worked quickly on a shed-like structure with a roof that will help the fridge regulate its temperature, especially in the summer heat.
Addison Yarbrough, the owner of Omie’s Coffee Shop and Roastery, lives a three-minute walk from the shop and said that it’s important for the space to be a community fixture that consistently serves their neighbors.
Hosting the 24/7 fridge has broadened how many people can access community resources at the coffee shop, she said.
Yarborough said she had been interested in hosting a community fridge for a long time but hadn’t known how to navigate setting one up. When she learned that DCF was looking for places to host fridges, she filled out an application and everything fell into place, she said.
The fridge builds the idea of community by having a give-and-take model, she said, and it only works if everyone is doing both.
“There have been times where I have had more abundance and there have been times that I have had more need,” she said. “And the fridge serves both of those times.”
In 2022, 19.8 percent of children and 12.2 percent of overall residents in Durham County experienced food insecurity, according to Feeding America.
That same year, 13.5 percent of the U.S. population experienced food insecurity, and in North Carolina, 14 percent of the population was food insecure.
Community fridges have grown increasingly popular as an alternative food resource over the past several years, and fridges exist across the country — from Miami to Chicago to New York City — to address food insecurity and waste.
A short drive from Durham, another community fridge has taken root in Orange County, inspired and supported by groups like DCF, B4K and the Chatham County-based nonprofit Feed-Well Fridges.
For over a year, the Chapel Hill Community Fridge has been stocked by a group of volunteers, including UNC Chapel Hill students, with food from grocery stores like Whole Foods, Weaver Street Market and Food Lion.
The fridge, which is in the lobby of the Community Empowerment Fund office on North Columbia Street, was established by the Mutual Aid Working Group (MAWG) of UNC’s Campus Y.
Like those run by DCF, this fridge is unmonitored, though it is only accessible when CEF is open.
UNC senior Amienata Fatajo is an executive board member at the Campus Y and a member of MAWG. She said that to her, food justice doesn’t have to be a radical idea. Access to food that fits one’s needs is a matter of equity, she said.
In Orange County, 11 percent of children and 12.3 percent of overall residents experienced food insecurity.
“The core prerequisite for being here – you just have to be hungry,” Fatajo said.
Cayson Tiedge, a graduate student at the UNC School of Social Work and the mutual aid coordinator of MAWG, said a large part of his role is organizing and coordinating with volunteers to ensure the fridge is cleaned and filled regularly.
Mutual aid has always existed in human society, he said, but there is often a rise in mutual aid when the systems set in place have failed them and community members want to address the inequities they see.
“It’s about spreading those connections to not only benefiting people you know but also people you don’t know, too,” he said. “Because I guess that’s kind of what it’s about – the whole community benefitting and supporting one another when the system is failing us.”
MAWG’s second community fridge will be opening in the Frank Porter Graham Student Union on Sunday, where students will be able to access it during a wide range of hours.
Back in Durham, Allison and Opinya are organizing #DurhamEats2025 with DCF and Root Causes, as well as raising money for a refrigerated van to transport food to communities that can’t easily access the fridges and pantries, such as east Durham.
East Durham is also a priority space for DCF, Aziz said, but the group wants to enter with care and intention by first building relationships and having conversations with residents about their needs.
DCF is also trying to educate and inspire people to get involved in their own ways with community fridges, she said.
“We’re trying to just pave the way and start the momentum and inspire other people to open fridges,” Aziz said. “You don’t have to have a beautiful structure like we have to open a fridge – I want to see fridges just plugged in with no structure on the corner.”
