Youth-Led Mutual Aid Team Feeds Their Richmond Hill Community, Acts as Government
On Saturday, a shopping cart filled with potatoes, onions, eggs, milk, peanut butter and more at Apna Bazar rang up to $35.08. The products were delivered to Southside Action Pact’s youth-led community fridge a few blocks away on 132nd Street to combat food insecurity in Richmond Hill, Queens.
Though FreshDirect partnered with New York City borough presidents and community-based organizations (CBOs) for a food drive known as “Operation 5-Borough Food Drive,” food pantry lines during the pandemic were extending across blocks in this neighborhood that once saw the highest COVID-19 positivity rate in Queens.
24 year old Farudh Emiel and 23 year old Anusuya Singh are the Director of Mutual Aid and the Senior Mutual Aid Advisor at Southside Action Pact. They knew they were facing an “ongoing issue exacerbated by the pandemic” in their already underserved neighborhood, Singh said.
That issue is food insecurity.
Unlike “Operation 5-Borough Food Drive,” the Ozone Park Community Fridge — which started in December 2020 — is open 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The 24/7 opening allows anyone to donate food to the fridge. The shared fridge includes fresh foods the community residents are familiar with and are able to cook their own meals from — an oversight of the city’s food drives, Southside Action Pact noted.
Emiel, Singh and the team of volunteers, as young as 15 years old, stock the fridge about three times a week. To help them decide what to purchase for the restocks, they pay close attention to what products are popular and what’s not.
The mutual aid team’s mission is to remove barriers to accessibility, such as documentation in the Indo and Afro-Caribbean immigrant community, making it easier for residents of all statuses to utilize its full benefits.
Dave Khan hosts the community fridge at the local small business he’s owned for the last seven years, Dave’s Barbershop & Hair Salon, and contributes to the electricity costs of running the fridge, which hovers in the hundreds of dollars per month.
Khan oversees the fridge on a daily basis, in between shaves and tape-ups, learning more about who visits it and what their needs are. The visitors include “people from all walks of life, such as young folks, old folks, not just homeless folks,” Khan said.
One community resident’s home burned down Wednesday evening. She visited the fridge for food, as well as milk for her six kittens. “It’s a blessing, it feeds all of us,” Jasmine Khan said (no relation to Dave Khan).
In an effort to avoid corporate grants that go against the mutual aid’s core values, Emiel searched for alternatives to upkeep the fridge and came upon a platform for organizers of color called JustFund.
Southside Action Pact was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the Emergent Fund. The rising 501(C)(3) non-profit organization has plans to upgrade the Ozone Park Community Fridge to a larger, energy-conservative refrigerator and build a weather-protective shelter around it.
Though the youth-led mutual aid team has plans to upgrade their efforts to help the community, they say that they are doing the government’s job.
“We have the resources to help our communities, but it’s on our government, state agencies, state entities and elected officials who refuse to actually put forward the work into our communities of color,” Emiel said.
Singh, the Senior Mutual Aid Advisor agrees. “We’re just here to kind of put a bandaid over a bullet wound.”
Later, Emiel will take the time to deliver baby food to the community fridge. The last set he placed was picked up quickly, showcasing a need for it.
“At the end of the day, we need structural change in our system to bring forth the liberation we see and we want,” Emiel said.
