by Alfredo Morales
Six years ago, I walked into the Civic Media Center carrying a box of dry goods, wearing a dark green cloth mask and a “Dream Defenders for Bernie” shirt.
After a few hours of unloading, sorting and then packing food into bags for delivery, I left the Civic Media Center with a car full of food and a list of addresses. Each address was a neighbor that had reached out, during a global pandemic, for help.
Free Grocery Store, as it currently exists, began in 2020 as a response to both the ongoing Black Lives Matter uprisings that challenged the racist, carceral systems around us and the government’s inability to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving many of our neighbors without protection.
Free Grocery Store is many things, but primarily it is a community powered mutual aid project, a combined effort from the tapestry of caring, creative comrades in this city that has freely fed hundreds of people in Gainesville weekly over the half-decade since we began keeping track.
Personally, Free Grocery Store is also how I met the constellation of people that enhance Gainesville, making it a special place full of heartfelt goodbyes before I move out west at the end of the summer.
Mutual aid, the thing that I have claimed to do within the Free Grocery Store over the last six years, can be hard to define.
Some people define mutual aid as an organizing philosophy rooted in the idea of “solidarity not charity.” Some others might define mutual aid as a survival strategy, a way of minimizing the damage of capitalism on our communities.
Regardless of the exact definition, it was the study of – and fervor for – mutual aid around the Civic Media Center in 2020 that renewed the Free Grocery Store. What began as a weekly distro of fresh veggies diverted from the landfill, due to coordination and collaboration between many organizers that have since also left Gainesville, very rapidly turned into a twice-a-week operation of countless volunteers donating, sorting, packing, delivering food and a handful of organizers trying to build something powerful from the anarchy.
Our current operation is fairly simple, although it still requires a lot of labor and coordination.
When you walk in, you grab a paper with a number on it, with some questions on household size and ages that are not required to be answered in order to receive food. While waiting in the courtyard you might find, depending on the day and volunteer capacity, a children’s station with toys, musicians giving lessons, herbal medicine, or just me answering questions in broken Spanish.
When your number is called, you come into the space to be greeted by a volunteer who offers grocery bags and assistance for recipients unable to shop for themselves. Otherwise, they are free to “shop” for themselves. Once finished picking out food, recipients head over to a check-out station where another volunteer weighs any food that has a limit, usually farm-fresh produce and proteins; bread is never weighed and neither are the random goodies that Bread of the Mighty Food Bank surprises us with. It’s a simple operation, which can obscure the Darwinian evolution of the Free Grocery Store as it navigated contradictions over the years. Because mutual aid is as alive as the people who do it.
Much like the people who do it, the Free Grocery Store has never been perfect. So much of what is described above came about because of conflict and contradiction, usually in the form of a question.
Who is doing the minutes, the social media captions? How are we introducing new volunteers? What are we going to do with all this bread? How is labor distributed?
The heart of any political project is in how it addresses these questions. We relied on our principle, radical to some, that food is a human right. When we expanded our walk-in services, concerns around COVID safety were addressed in solidarity with disabled volunteers, providing an understanding that making the space accessible to everyone meant creating a safe environment.
We moved to have people wait in the courtyard to allow people ample space to shop, and along with a mask requirement and several air purifiers, we created a clean air environment. Some decisions were significantly more difficult: volunteer capacity and burnout led us to shrinking our pantry dates in 2024 and focusing primarily on walk-up pantries last year.
We had periods of tactical retreat in our ultimate goal to redistribute the means of food production and consumption back into the community. Mutual aid, our survival tactic and framework for achieving this goal, fortunately provided a community ready to provide. We held chili cook-offs at How Bazar, we have a donation drop-off at Working Food, we receive food from Bread of the Mighty Food Bank, we constantly collaborate with Food Not Bombs, and we receive farm-fresh vegetables from Giving Garden, Siembra, Nicoya and others. Free Grocery Store, much like myself, became rooted in Gainesville through the relationship it had built with others.
Last year, I walked into the Civic Media Center to see people already waiting in the courtyard several hours before the pantry was scheduled to open. It was our first in-person pantry since SNAP benefits were frozen for millions across the country, affecting thousands of families in Alachua County.
I opened up the space with the help of some regular volunteers, mostly folks who’ve been to the pantry to receive food often enough that they knew exactly where everything was, and knew, better than I did, where to put everything. I handed a stack of numbers to a volunteer who sat outside long past her number getting called to make sure everyone who walked in also got theirs.
A lot has changed over the past six years, but we’re still in crisis. Reactionary forces have left people starving and surveilled, and more motivated to take action. Free Grocery Store gave me, and so many people, an opportunity to directly do something about it, to use my labor to actively change the conditions around us.
This is mutual aid in action, it’s a creative, collaborative process. It’s engaging your neighbor in solidarity and surviving together. Mutual aid is the soil under the cracked concrete where grass grows.
You can find the Free Grocery Store on Facebook/Instagram as @gnvfgs, and there’s more information on how to get plugged in on our website, gnvfgs.org.
The people carrying on with the mutual aid work are also requesting some specific items for the summer: baby safe foods, formula, healthy and organic non-produce things like granolas and packaged staples like rice, beans, quinoa, oats.
Alfredo is moving to Denver, Colorado at the end of the summer. He hopes to both expand the mutual aid work he does while in Denver and also that the mutual aid projects here in Gainesville continue to flourish from community support.