Volunteers are needed!
We can always use donations of your time and skills.
Help out at the grocery share, help distribute food to Community Fridges, help cook for the food share on Saturdays, spread the word and love, help by designing social content. See more below.
Ways you can volunteer
Pick up and distribute food for the fridges, food share, or for cooking. We have also been offering home delivery to at-risk and disabled people who have no longer been able to come to the Saturday shares. Cars, vans, etc. are helpful, as are cargo bikes, but some regular pickups can be done on foot or regular bicycle (Be sure to ask/mention what type of transportation you have access to!). There is a Signal group for help with distribution requests. *If you have a vehicle and can help please join that group!* Please visit the driver page for more info.
Help organize a specific fridge. This involves checking on it regularly, cleaning it, stocking it whenmaking sure others know when it’s low on food, sharing pictures with other organizers for social media, and letting the network know how quickly things are moving, and when more food is needed.
Solicit donations of food that would otherwise go to waste from businesses. This can be done remotely via phone or email or it can be done in person! For community fridges organized by In Our Hearts, we prefer food to be rescued, not purchased. Therefore, we need people like you to talk to businesses and ask them to donate to the many community fridges out there!
Volunteer at a public food share. Every Saturday at 3pm in Von King Park, BedStuy we host a Food not Bombs Food Share, with groceries donated from local co-ops and other grocers and growers in the city. Food that would otherwise have gone to waste. We always welcome new volunteers with or without vehicles or cargo bike skills.
In collaboration with: @communitysolidarity
Thanks to Community Solidarity and their van as well other volunteer drivers we have a huge bounties of rescued food to share each week!
and @feedthepeople_bedstuy
Every week Feed the People - BedStuy make delicious vegan meals that are given out with our groceries
Cook or prepare food for the Saturday share, to bring to jail support, or an event or action we are in solidarity with.
Food reclamation / food rescue / upcycling or even dumpster diving! A huge motivation in setting up these fridges for many of us has been to eliminate as much food waste as possible and to highlight the issue of surplus food being wasted. If you’re interested in learning how this is done there are a number of organizers happy to show you the ropes!
Spread the word! Help put up fliers and posters around the neighborhoods—wheat pasting or taping. Spreading the word digitally is also super important! Go ahead and repost our content on all the socials and encourage your friends to do the same! Translation skills are also needed for materials.
Design materials to promote these efforts—we have an interactive online map that was created by a member. A volunteer has designed Mutual Aid fliers to pass out. There are plans to create informative handouts or pamphlets to encourage businesses to upcycle what they aren’t going to sell, and there have been some individual fridge-specific fliers made for hyper-local distribution. It would be great to have more design help.
Important ways to help or get more involved with In Our Hearts specifically are:
Social Media Management
Website upkeep
Coordination/Management of supporting new fridge projects and coordination of things listed above
Be good to each other.
These are stressful trying times, so understand when people aren’t at their best and show them understanding. We are all part of this because we want to do good things for each other and make the world a better place, that starts with how we treat each other. Assume the best intentions of everyone. Spread love and build community—and Spread the Word!