Chicago's Community Fridges

USDA assigns four ranges to food security and insecurity. Food insecurity describes households that don’t have regular access to a variety of high quality food and might also experience hunger or disrupted eating as a result.  In Chicago, 1 in 5 households experience food insecurity.  Food insecurity is measured using some of the same indicators and parameters as poverty measures.

Community fridges are mutual aid projects where fridges and pantry spaces are set up in public so that anyone can donate to them and anyone can take food. They follow the mutual aid principles of hyper-local aid to neighbors and don’t have any requirements for donating or taking food. Often, community fridges fill a gap in food security for households and individuals that might not feel comfortable using other resources or might not meet another program’s requirements. A community fridge’s priorities are food justice, accessibility, anonymity, and community-driven engagement.

Despite being a novel solution to addressing food insecurity, community fridges are not well-studied. Our project has two goals:

1. Locate and provide a convenient map of current community fridges in the Chicago area.
2. Identify areas where future fridges would be successful, based on need, access, and community support.

By using GIS and the spatial criteria we have found successful for current fridges based on need, access, and community support, we analyzed our data to suggest additional locations for community fridges. Our hope is to spread awareness of the work community groups are doing to provide mutual aid in Chicago. We also hope to provide a theoretical framework to guide the location of future fridges to successfully address food insecurity in the area.

Our project began with identifying where current community fridges are located in Chicago. To make our data as accurate as possible, we only mapped fridges we could verify being active in the past year. Our verification process included connecting directly with the community partner, website/social media updates, and visiting fridge locations. Because of their mutual aid basis, tracking community fridge activity can be difficult. We recognize some fridges may have been unintentionally excluded from the data. Part of this project is to spread awareness for Chicago's fridge network and build a data reference source.

•  The Freedge Network  began in Davis, CA, and now monitors community fridges all over the world and provides guidelines for communities that want to establish their own. In our conversations, Freedge leaders emphasized success factors like: proximity to grocery stores, walkability and accessibility, and managing relationships both with fridge hosts and fridge NIMBYs.
•  Love Fridge  is the largest community fridge network in Chicago, managing between 18-25 community fridges in Chicago. Their organization focuses on hyper-local fridges and a volunteer system by leveraging knowledge across Chicago. Love Fridges are designed and decorated to match their community.
•  Veggie Mijas  is a national Food Justice organization that manages community fridges in multiple U.S. cities. Chicago’s Veggie Mijas fridge is in Little Village (La Villita). Veggie Mijas focuses on access to healthy, plant-based food, specifically for women, children, and non-binary community members.
•  Dion’s Chicago Dream  is an organization that provides community fridges, vaults, and deliveries for the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago. Dion’s dream is to address food insecurity to improve health outcomes and center health equity in underserved neighborhoods. Unlike other community fridge networks, Dion’s Chicago Dream operates under a nonprofit model. It still follows the principles of community fridge mutual aid by being an anonymous resource open to all.
•  Evanston Community Fridges  do not operate within the city of Chicago, however, their experiences in placing and evaluating fridges helped us to validate our methodology. The organizers gave us additional insight into the factors that make fridges more or less successful.

We contacted each of these organizations, utilized their online resources, and were able to have conversations with experts from the Freedge Network and Evanston Community Fridges.

After identifying existing fridge locations, we researched factors that make a fridge successful. We gathered qualitative data by talking with community partners. They observed successful fridges based on three factors: need, access, and community support.

Based on this data, we built a reclassification scheme (table below) to create a suitability index that will show possible areas in Chicago to site a community fridge. We created numeric values for each factor, representing suitability with higher scores. We then added these values up to produce an overall indexed score. This index is represented in a raster map that symbolizes successful areas for a future fridge.

We scored each criteria based on the following:

• NEED:
  • Poverty above or below national trends from census data. Census tracts with concentrated poverty (greater than 20% poverty) is given additional weight.
  • Food insecurity classified as low access or high to medium access based on USDA's Food Atlas dataset.
  • Areas further than 0.5 miles from an existing fridge, based on a buffer of our community fridge data.
• ACCESS:
  • Transit stops (CTA rail) buffered 0.5 miles based on data from City of Chicago Data Portal
  • Walkability ranking above or below average from Chicago Health Atlas
• COMMUNITY SUPPORT:
  • Mutual aid rate above or below average based on the Social Capital Atlas's measure of volunteering rates.
  • Grocery store proximity buffered 1 mile based on data from City of Chicago Data Portal.
  • Small businesses in the area above or below average from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Survey. This statistic is determined by identifying the percentage of employees working at small businesses.

Based on the suitability index we made, the raster map above shows possible locations for future fridges that could be successful. A score of 8 is the highest suitability, and is represented as dark purple.

This map is designed to be a useful resource for community-based groups, not a strict guideline. Our geospatial suitability analysis captured as many variables as possible, but ultimately community knowledge is necessary to make a fridge successful.

We may have identified suitable locations for a fridge that wouldn't work well in practice due to factors we aren't aware of. Conversely, there may be successful fridges in locations that we didn't identify. However, we hope this map can be a useful tool to encourage the placement of community fridges in underserved areas to achieve food justice. Explore the map to find an area and get started with one of the many organizations in Chicago to build your own community fridge!

Mutual aid is based on the principles of accessibility and anonymity. Because of this, many fridges are supported by a decentralized network of organizers. We made an effort to contact all publicly known community fridge operators in the Chicago area, but there are still many people operating in this space that we were not able to connect with. 

Fridge success is often based on word of mouth and there is not much searchable information online. We have only included fridges that we could verify were in operation in the past year (since 2022). However, there are likely other fridges in Chicago that we couldn’t confirm. If you’re aware of a Chicago fridge not included here, please contact the Freedge Network. They will add it to a national GIS database of fridge locations. 

Not all factors for successful fridges are geospatial and sometimes important knowledge is only available to members of the community. For example, fridge success may also be impacted by: 

• Community attitudes towards low-income or homeless people
• Cultural norms about accepting or donating free food 
• Strength of fridge’s mutual aid support network 
• Awareness through word of mouth 
• Appropriateness of food within the fridge for the community 

By creating this analysis, we hope to support mutual aid networks in Chicago in identifying areas with strong potential for fridges. Community knowledge will fill in the gaps left by our analysis in growing fridge networks in the future.

Click  here  to access an interactive web application including these data. We encourage you to explore and use these data!

Click  here  to download a zipped folder of our shapefiles and raster layer.

•  CTA Rail Stations Shapefile 
•  Census Tract Shapefile 
•  Poverty Data Table 
•  Walkability Index Data 
•  Volunteering Rate Data 
•  Small Business Employment Data 
•  Food Atlas Data