Little Free Pantry
littlefreepantry.org
littlefreepantry.org
If you want to make a difference, set up a recurring donation to your local foodbank instead, or volunteer to help. People in financial need already go there, so you can help them by not making them run around town to a bunch of free little pantries, and help them avoid the shame of using that pantry in your neighbourhood being watched by all your neighbours.
This feels like one of those initiatives that benefit the provider more than the intended recipient.
I would like to suggest that it's an even better thing when it's done personally and actively. You learn who your neighbors are, for a start, and there's even a chance you'll bind yourself tighter to your community!
It's also interesting to see that places are investigating direct shipments to homes as well. I don't have any sources but discussions with local food banks. I was told over a year ago that west coast states have started testing it.
I think both these ideas can help different groups of hungry people. Those with an address & those without.
They could drop leaflets in mailboxes that people could check off if they need food, and then you could go back and collect the leaflets, and know who to deliver to. Or make the leaflets prepaid postage to just return via the mail.
I'm not sure how the food delivery works in all parts of the country, but I believe you would sign up yourself or a family member to receive a collection. Note, many people won't signup themselves.
What if they want to buy something in a shop, is that illegal? What happens if you have a homeless friend and you invite them round for dinner?
Or is it like pigeons, you just get signs in the park saying 'don't feed the homeless'
Speaking as a European, this just sounds bizarre.
I mean, I doubt it - there has to be a bigger point that I'm missing. (right?)
There is no larger point. People are cruel, particularly certain political parties that tend to maintain power in the American South.
Do you know what the background is?
A year later, which city do you think will have more rough sleepers?
Florida have decided they're City B.
†They'll say they're helping the rough sleepers reunite with their families, but we all know what's really going on.
Almost every other state in America deals with this the "traditional way", by having cops kick their ass until they move somewhere out of public view. Florida (and one or two other states) want to prevent them from coming to the state at all, so they're trying to make it harder to live there.
When I last worked in a supermarket (just over three years ago) taking home or giving away food that was destined for the bin was treated as theft. You could be fired for it if your manager felt that way inclined.
Several months before I started, several people at another store lost their jobs for just that. Instead of throwing out the bake-goods, they'd been giving them out in small amounts to people who were struggling.
Sometimes it was a handful of bread-rolls, other times it would be croissants or muffins. There was no loss to the company because the food had been written off anyway. Still -- it was treated as theft, and they were fired. The company would prefer the food was wasted than it feed people.
I'm not saying these issues are more important than keeping people fed, but I do think addressing these sorts of things would go a long way to make policies allowing food to be given away more practical.
Pretty sure the liability thing is just a convenient excuse. In the US we have the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects food donors from being sued. I bet most other countries have something similar. Additionaly, nobody has ever been sued over donated food in the US.
In that case, I don't follow supermarkets' logic. If donations are restricted to people who can't otherwise afford the food, and the food will be discarded anyway, why not donate it? Maybe some people will substitute donated food in place of purchasing food themselves. I wonder if supermarkets have data suggesting this is a meaningful fraction of customers.
As another poster said, no one has been sued in the US for donations, but supermarket chains are also reticent about the optics of donating food that has clearly expired. Just because you won't be sued doesn't mean you won't feel some blowback in public sentiment if you cause an outbreak of food poisoning in the food-insecure demographic of the population by improperly donating food.
http://www.nzwc.ca/focus/food/guidelines-for-food-donations/...
The pantries I work with collect and redistribute food from something like 30 different local businesses and organizations, including local supermarkets (mostly "day-old" bread and pastries), cafeterias (surplus prepared food), and farmers (surplus produce). We also benefit from middle-man organizations that collect at a larger scale and redistribute to smaller pantries like us -- large donations of canned and other packaged food, gleaned fruits and vegetables which are perfectly fine but didn't make the market cut (ie, ugly tomatoes), and the like.
They generally need hot meals and snacks that can be consumed promptly. They have little to no storage capacity and carrying things everywhere is exhausting.
They do not appear to be the intended recipients of the types of goods made available in this manner.
But to your brand new point, can there not be more than one system to give to the needy? Maybe you don’t want to carry can goods with you to work, maybe you don’t want to interact with strangers, maybe you want to help people at times you’re not physically in front of them.
It sounds like you have a bone to pick with this concept but you lack a compelling reason to argue against it. Here, I’ll share my reasons for not installing one at my house. The wild animals will want it, the heat here is extreme and will cook its contents, and I don’t want strangers loitering in front of my house.
Still it’s an interesting concept. It might work well for some people is some areas.
> Who is the Little Free Pantry for? The LFP is for neighbors helping neighbors. In high poverty areas, the LFP is most often for those who are not easily able to meet everyday food and personal needs. In middle class neighborhoods, the LFP might stock after-school snacks for neighborhood kids or that "cup of sugar" you never have when you need it. (In my case it's an onion.) In all places, the Little Free Pantry is for those who want and/or need to give.
They also go into how it differs from a traditional food pantry which already exists:
> How does the Little Free Pantry differ from other food pantries? ...
All that said, I do think this is won't turn out well for a few other reasons:
- wild animals
- liability
- the elements
Food is very different from books, books have relatively low value, and are easier to protect from the elements (they don't get literally baked by excessive heat/humidity).
While it's nice to see the effort (I'm glad people are trying to make things better for each other) this might be a feel-good local thing to do, but it's not the way to fix societal problems sustainably. If you want to get rid of high poverty areas pay people living wages (in my opinion this is more than enough to pay the rent), and stop funding an already over-budgeted military in favor of funding school programs.
But for animals and the elements, we used to keep food (especially canned) outdoors year-round all the time, as a totally normal part of life. One of my grandparents was still doing it as late as the 90s. Granted that was done underground, but still, isn't that what technology's for? What good's all this newly-cheap democratized high-tech futuristic maker junk if it can't keep racoons and heat/cold from ruining a few cans of tomatoes in a box without having to stick it under the dirt like our very-recent-ancestors did?
As for liability, maybe this'll have to be reserved for freer places than us, in the end. The US (and a couple other countries) love our huge signs covered in tiny magical-liability-deflecting words, after all. They'll be a key feature in our reconstructed religion when future archeologists are trying to figure out WTF was going on with us. They're not so far removed from the long formulaic texts you find on/in Egyptian tombs, actually, and in the same ballpark so far as silliness goes.
I think the LFP adds a great deal to a community so I am not knocking the idea. Maybe the idea needs to be more than a pantry though. We all chuck stuff out that could be given a second home. Some people pay good money to drive to the tip and dump stuff that could be re-used. We also get stuff in the back of our food cupboards that are not going to be eaten. Maybe we need small-shed sized 'pantries' that enable more to go on. As well as being community they could also have the council clear the contents out on a fortnightly basis, so it is just a well ordered 'cache' of stuff to go to the tip.
(in SF people get stuff from the food bank and then sell it on the sidewalks around mid-market)
furthermore, such violations of trust are helpful indicators of the types of structural issues present in one's community.
sure. there might be places in crisis where such a system wouldn't be able to get enough traction to function. in such a place, one should turn one's attention to the big picture.
The majority of the people who needed to use the box did so respectfully and properly. There is a huge need, particularly here in the bay area of California, where the number of people forced into homelessness has exploded over the past several years.
The problem with systems like this is that they have no oversight, the bad apples find them and take/destroy with glee, and it doesn't take many of those folks to ruin it for everyone else.
As far as reselling items: Prevention is simple. Make a safety net, make sure folks have housing, and make sure there is medically backed addiction help out there. It won't solve all of it, but it surely raises the bar as folks won't be so desperate to rob a bunch of tiny pantries instead of a store. Other sorts of prevention just punishes people struggling, both the one selling and the one buying.
Edit: Also, stores selling illegal goods should be prevented now. SUrely we have the tools if not the manpower.
It's actually okay that panhandlers sell food on the street. They're exchanging a plentiful commodity for a liquid asset. They need money to live, not just food.
And dollars per hour, sadly, drugs are about the cheapest form of entertainment our society has to offer.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...