In a North Corvallis neighborhood, near the intersection of NW Grant Avenue and NW 26th St., a miniature refrigerator-freezer sits outside, plugged into an adjacent house, waiting for visitors to take what it has in stock or deposit foods or drinks they’d like others to have. Those passing by the area who might not see it right away may spot a bright yellow sign in the shape of an arrow on a sidewalk corner, the words “Community Fridge” and an accompanying Spanish translation, “Nevera Comunitara,” written across its surface.
Independent of any large organizations or sources of funding, the appliance — known as the Corvallis Community Fridge — is regularly restocked and maintained by its “fridge steward,” a local resident who goes by the name Micah, who also runs social media pages with information about the endeavor.
Micah, who lived in Salem for many years before moving to Corvallis, took inspiration to start this project from the group Free Fridge Salem, a community-based network of refrigerators and pantries organized to increase local access to free food and other resources.
“I’ve watched it start and grow, and there are organizers who do a lot of work for the fridges and have made it into this mutual aid network,” said Micah. “They have a central Instagram account that links to individual fridges, they coordinate soup deliveries to unhoused people wherever they’re living, they help people get access to WiFi, and they have another project where they do these coffee deliveries in the mornings and wake people up who are sleeping in front of businesses so that the business owners or whoever aren’t actively kicking people out.”
A Fridge Begins
Micah was also inspired by the Portland Free Fridge network; many of these fridges are sheltered in outdoor food pantries that have been built by community members and painted by local artists and muralists.
“I’ve followed and supported some of these groups on Instagram and really just thought, ‘Okay, where is this where I live?’” he said. “I knew I had the ability to buy a secondhand fridge and a place to put it, and I figured it’ll be imperfect, but let’s just try it and see what happens.”
Having acquired the fridge in the summer of 2021, Micah first began stocking it with bottled water in preparation for the deadly heat dome that fell over Oregon during the last weekend of June. Since then, he has been experimenting with different additions to the fridge with each restock, such as granola bars, cheese snacks, microwavable meals, homemade soups, bread, and even plums grown and picked from his backyard.
No Strings Attached
For Micah, another motivation for starting the fridge was a desire to engage in a community-caring effort apart from charity and nonprofit work.
“I’ve worked for nonprofits before, and I think about that world a lot because I think about its shortcomings a lot,” he said. “I think about the way that nonprofits may have explicit missions, like ending poverty or hunger, but also, if they ever accomplished these things, they wouldn’t exist. So when I’m questioning nonprofits’ motives, I always think, are people willing for their nonprofits to not exist one day, and are they trying to run themselves out of business, or are they really invested in making their check?”
One of the nonprofits Micah used to work for was a college access nonprofit whose mission involved, among other things, ensuring traditionally underserved college students had greater financial opportunities to afford higher education and successfully make their way through college.
“The really big, classic scholarships that kids were working really hard to try to earn are the Ford family and the Gates scholarships, but the Ford family and the Gates family and all these people rise up to the top off the exploitation of the people who actually do the labor that makes them money,” said Micah. “The people giving out these scholarships think, we’ll get these Brown kids some money to go to college and we’ll take photos of them, and we’ll put the photos on our website to cover up — it’s not too dramatic to say — the atrocities of the horrible working conditions and human rights violations that make someone at the top really rich so that they can give back to nonprofits that do things that will have good optics.”
Micah noted that even in our day-to-day interactions, optics play a role in determining who gets to receive the resources and services that are needed for survival, based on who appears to be the most “worthy” of them.
“I think that in our own lives, if someone is, say, in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer holding a sign, the micro question is, who do you stop for? What kind of person do you feel is approachable?” he said. “At the macro level, I think the question is, who has the right optics to be getting these kinds of services?”
Such questions, he added, may lead people to challenge their own assumptions about the structure of nonprofits in general — along with that of charities.
“Our belief in charity is that it’s altruistic and it only goes in one direction, but in reality, there’s weird strings attached; you have to prove you need services, and you have to continue to prove this, to act grateful,” said Micah. “You have to present yourself in a certain way to be someone that gets granted services. But what if we went away with that power dynamic entirely?”
Charity vs. Mutual Aid
In navigating these questions, Micah was partially drawn to the gift economy model of local Buy Nothing groups.
“The Buy Nothing group is really based on the idea that you give something when you have something to give and you ask for a gift when you want or need something, and there’s no need to trade or pay someone back later; that’s really hard for people to learn when they start doing Buy Nothing, but it’s really radical,” he said. “So I’ve taken that and thought, what does it look like to not exchange money or performances of gratitude or performances of helplessness for things that you need? What if you could just get them because you deserve them? What if we’re all deserving, and what if we all take care of each other?”
In this model, everyone is supported, and everyone’s needs are valued.
“Rather than a hierarchical person giving out of the goodness of their hearts to the people below them, which is the charity model, mutual aid is about peer-to-peer networks,” he said. “And I’ve battled a lot of thoughts like, what if someone is taking food who doesn’t need it, or what if it’s just one person who swept all the food out? Mutual aid is teaching us to not worry about that, because you’re thinking of everyone’s needs getting met, and those thoughts are just me getting tripped up on my own power as the person often filling the fridge. It’s an opportunity for me to step down off of my high horse about thinking I deserve some sort of performance from the people who take food from the fridge.”
How the Fridge Can Grow
In regards to the future of the Corvallis Community Fridge, Micah said that one of the things he would like to see happen is for it to become a network of free fridges — and voluntary fridge stewards — spread throughout the city.
“When we look at these examples of different networks, we see that if we meet our neighbors, talk to each other and get to know each other, there’s these opportunities to figure out things like, here’s a highly trafficked area that would be a good location for a fridge, and here’s somebody who could steward a fridge,” he said. “The scenario right now is, you’ve happened across this fridge, and it’s not empty — great, but how could it be more? How could a network of fridges really feel community-owned?”
One idea, Micah suggested, would be for each fridge to have boxes of comment cards or other avenues for people to directly provide their input when they visit, including requests or recommendations for what they’d like to see at a fridge.
He also noted that stewarding a fridge doesn’t have to fall on just one person; collecting feedback, grocery shopping, cooking, restocking, cleaning and checking on fridges can be shared responsibilities between anyone in the community.
“Something that can happen, and that I can argue is already happening [here], is that it’s just me or another person running this fridge, basically stewarding it on their own, not really communicating with other people, not really meeting other people,” he said. “That takes work, and I would hope that a potential network of fridges would feel very collectivist, and not recreate nonprofit hierarchy issues or thoughts like, ‘Well, this is my fridge on my porch, so it’s going to be this way.’ If we’re not actively thinking about or questioning those things in our own mutual aid work, how can it be sustainable?”
Should a network come to fruition, Micah would also like to help create — much like what the Portland and Salem Free Fridge networks have — a map of the locations of these fridges, along with other, lesser known community resources.
“I would love to set up a print-out that could also be on social media where you could see the addresses of the free fridges and the little free libraries in town, and hygiene cabinets and food pantries and whatever else would feel relevant,” he said. “That also has more of a mutual aid feel, because I think the local nonprofits already have the reach and the publicity that make it easier for people to figure out where those are.”
For those who would like to help make the next restock possible, or who are interested in lending their skills or ideas to the project, you can send a direct message to Micah through the fridge’s Instagram page or Facebook page.
By Emilie Ratcliff
Correction: In the original article, we said that Micah had worked for the Institute for College Access & Success. This was not the case, and has been changed. Our apologies.
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