Non- EBT Product DriveMany of the people who stopped by us while we were tabling did not know why we were tabling. Despite our efforts to hang fliers on campus and reach out to other fridge instagram accounts to repost our flyer, most people seemed to not be able to provide us with goods for our drive, as they did not bring them to campus with them.
We seemed to have the greatest success raising money for the drive when there were more of us tabling. Unfortunately, our schedules were very different and it was uncommon that more than more than two of us were able to table together. |
The VoicemailYefet reached out to members of Makeshift as he had previously worked with them in the past to enquire about setting up food rescue projects. When doing so, he was forwarded a voicemail which was left by a landlord of one of the surrounding condos. It explained how the fridge was illegal and that the landlord would be making an effort to ensure it was removed. We immediately sent this voicemail to Laura.
This incident revealed to us the challenges that community fridges can face, and that while they may have a positive impact on communities they may not be a long term solution due to potential illegality. We hope that the fridge is able to remain where it is, but we haven't heard any updates from Laura on this matter. |
Food Rescue ProjectsOur efforts to set up relationships between the fridge and surrounding restaurants was mostly unsuccessful. Some locations would not answer our calls for their manager's emails, and even when we got the manager's email the email was often not responded to. On the rarer occasion that we did get a response the restaurants often told us that they were either not interested or did not normally have extra food to give.
We think these responses may have been caused by the fact that we were looking for them to drop off their food to the fridge. We think if we were proposing something where we collected their food they may have been more interested in participating, as it may have been an easier request for them. There are a large lack of volunteers as fridge champions and as drivers which makes this partnership even more challenging. |