Volunteer Thadeaus Umpster with the anarchist collective In Our Hearts delivering donated produce to community fridges in the Bed Stuy section of Brooklyn.

Courtesy IOHNYC/IOHNYC

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Courtesy IOHNYC/IOHNYC

Volunteer Thadeaus Umpster with the anarchist collective In Our Hearts delivering donated produce to community fridges in the Bed Stuy section of Brooklyn.

Courtesy IOHNYC/IOHNYC

Marina Vergara has been involved in distributing food to Los Angeles’ large homeless population for years through her work with a nonprofit that supports the chronically unhoused.

But this spring, she heard about something new. Free food refrigerators, or “freedges,” were springing up all over New York as the deadly pandemic fueled a striking rise in wider food insecurity and hunger. Vergara reached out to the members of the collective who were setting up them up.

“They connected me with a few different people in L.A. who were thinking about doing this,” she says.