Volunteering Description/hours
Food justice & mutual aid
Combining this course's focus on food sovereignty & justice with its focus on asset-based volunteering/involvement, we discovered a lot through Mutual Aid. Because it was a mutual aid group, we saw asset based involvement through many different avenues. The community fridge literally allows community members to directly aid other members, the food pantry sources its food from many different community organizations across Boston, from the Seventh-day Adventist Church to Lovin' Spoonfuls. Mutual aid focuses on food sovereignty by allowing all community members fair access to the food collected, ensuring that they have a variety of healthy foods and prepared staples to choose from.
These images, in order are as follows:
The Seventh-day Adventist Church near Fenway, where Trae and Jack went to sort food donated by the community to this community center. They then brought this food via car to Northeastern's campus to be further sorted into bins on Wednesday and disseminated via their mobile food pantry.
Pictures 2 and 3 are of the community fridge located outside Hillel. Olivia would pick up food bins from Hillel and pass these bins during her weekly journey. This fridge was along her weekly journey, and another part of Mutual Aid's food-focused sector. The fridge gets cleaned every week and checked every day by a different person, and the food in it can come from anyone, so its fullness fluctuates.
The fourth picture is of a Lovin' Spoonfuls truck, where Olivia would bring food bins from Hillel to then collect food and cart back to Curry Student Center.
The fifth picture is of Mutual Aid's weekly Food Pantry. Kay sorts all the food dropped off in Curry into bins and carts them down to the Pantry's tables on Centennial Common to then be handed out to patrons.
Volunteer Hour Tracking
Half of our group ended up doing weekly volunteering organizing for the food pantry, and the other half did a lot of asynchronous, online work. See the inserted google sheets below for our volunteering hours and descriptions, each sheet a different person.
Volunteer Schedule/Outline
1:30-2:30 Wednesday Kay: Sorting food for pantry
12:00-1:00 Wednesday Olivia: Get bins/pick up food and prep for sorting
Tuesdays Trae & Jack: Sorting and boxing food, transporting it to campus.
