Katherine Franco

I run a food justice organization that just turned three years old in February. We build community fridges with pantries attached to them in marginalized communities across Orlando and Tampa. The way it works is we have volunteers who rescue food from different restaurants, and community members prepare sandwiches, meals, period kits, and hygiene kits that they set up in the pantry. Anyone in need can grab what they need whenever they want because it's an open 24/7 operation. We started with one community fridge and pantry, and now we're building our fifth location at a shelter. Before this, I worked in corporate for the past seven years in business operations and human resources. Through doing sustainability work and volunteering outside of work hours, I realized I had developed a passion for caring for others. I wanted to help people by passing information and resources, but I realized there were a lot of barriers to directly help people when representing a corporation. As I volunteered, I developed more passion for mutual aid movements and community members coming together to help one another. This project is dedicated to people who have so many barriers to accessing not just food, but healthy food. When I'm raised in a marginalized community, all there is readily available is just junk, not a lot of fresh produce. So we launched a community garden with the city that's a few months old now, and we've already grown almost 1,000 plus pounds of fresh organic produce that we put in our community fridge. We're also working on advocacy and workshops to teach the community how to grow fresh vegetables, how to homestead, and different things they could cook. The idea came when I visited New York around 2019 and saw community fridges in Brooklyn. I thought, how come we don't have this in Florida? So in December 2022, I came up with a name, got a friend to help with a logo and branding kit, and made an Instagram account for the project. From there, I started fundraising, and it's been three years of collaborations. We've already rescued 115,000 pounds of food from restaurants, farms, and food banks and redistributed it back to communities in need.