L.J. Abraham was thinking of the food deserts in Memphis when she asked friends on Facebook if they would help her create a community refrigerator.

Four years later, 901 Community Fridges is exactly what it sounds like: A series of outdoor refrigerators open day or night, when feeding lines are closed or fast food is closed, with shelves stocked every day with what everyday people have to give.

What Abraham didn’t expect is the level of community that would form around even one refrigerator left chugging away in the elements.

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“It’s unbelievable that people care enough about if their neighbors have food to continue to fill them for four years,” she said.

“There’s literally a little bit of everybody. There’s some organizations that do it. There are families who prepare meals and individually package them and label them and put them in the refrigerator. Restaurants sometimes have leftovers they put it in the refrigerator,” said Abraham, 43.

Minutes after Abraham said that, a truck of construction workers on their lunch break pulled up to the fridge outside First Congo in Cooper-Young. They took several gallons of milk and a box of cereal before driving off.

Two other men walked up and scanned the remaining gallons of milk on the shelves.

Two hours before, the shelves were lined with jars of Gerber baby food.

At Holy Trinity Community Church, 685 S. Highland St., the 30-member congregation helps care for its 901 Fridge, which now has a sheltered shelf for the nonperishables people had been putting in the fridge, volunteer coordinator Lee Goins said.

“We believe everyone has a right to food no matter who you are or your income level. Food should be a human right,” Goins said. “Having the outdoor fridge helps us out because it’s something the community can help with.” 

Holy Trinity’s fridge is the second-busiest behind the one at First Congo, which opened in 2021. There are now five more, including a refrigerator at 472 Marianna St. run by Food Not Bombs Memphis. The seventh refrigerator is expected to open in North Memphis this month.

All the fridges are housed in wooden frames meant to protect them from the elements, particularly the heat. The sponsoring organization pays the electrical costs.

The people who stock them and the people who use them monitor the community’s Facebook page, a continuous log of when people drop off food, a brief description of what they left and perhaps a note on the conditions they found.

The private group has 4,600 followers.

“Social media pretty much runs the communication part,” Abraham said.

Early in the week, the refrigerator at 685 S. Highland St. was empty, Kate Furst said in a post with a photo of the empty shelves.

“This fridge services a lower-income area and college students. It could really use some love on a regular basis. As a student and neighborhood resident, I check it often,” she said.

The post was shared over and over, Abraham said.

“I’m sure people went and filled it up, but when you hear that a kid, a student at the University of Memphis, is hungry, why?” Abraham said.

Barbara Boucher left a total of 180 meals in three refrigerators Monday, Sept. 9, including at First Congo. All of the food was gleaned from caterers and farmers markets by the Recover Food, Feed Hope program at Church of the Holy Communion.

Another group from the church delivered a similar number of meals to the remaining 901 fridges on Thursday, Sept. 12

“With a lot of pantries, people who need food can only get it at certain times or, in some cases, can only get it so many times a month,” Boucher said. “With the refrigerators, if you don’t want people to know you are hungry, you can maintain your dignity and just get the food. You don’t have to ask anybody for it.”

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Her group likes the refrigerators because in a handful of stops, it can share food with hundreds of people across the city.

Last year, Holy Communion distributed 11,765 pounds of food, or about 9,500 meals, to a variety of groups by becoming one of a few places in town with infrastructure and a labor supply that can quickly repackage bulk leftovers in 2.5-pound containers, enough for two people, cook the missing side dishes and quickly get the load delivered.

Also, 901 Community Fridges asks donors to label the food. Boucher’s group adds notes about what the proteins are, saying many people don’t eat pork or beef.

“I never felt the need to put a date on what we leave because it doesn’t get old. Things don’t sit there long,” she said.

Because it clears out so fast, there are always rumors, Boucher said, the food is being sold.

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“I don’t think there’s much street value on this food, but I will say we did print some stickers to put on some of packaging at the refrigerators where we were told people were selling the meals,” she said. “The stickers said, ‘This meal is free. Please do not pay for it.’ But I said, ‘You know what? If someone is willing to pay a buck for a meal and they get food, I don’t care how they got it.’ It’s balanced. It’s nutritious food. It’s not junk.” 

“My hope was that we would just be able to stop doing it because elected officials would pay attention to the fact that there are so many food deserts and so many people struggling just to put food on their tables. They just never paid attention. So we kept going because we have to.”

L.J. Abraham
Founder of 901 Community Fridges

Abraham started the program thinking it would be a short-term project.

“My hope was that we would just be able to stop doing it because elected officials would pay attention to the fact that there are so many food deserts and so many people struggling just to put food on their tables,” she said. “They just never paid attention. So we kept going because we have to.”

Hunter Demster is head of facilities and the food-justice ministry at First Congo, which includes the 901 Fridge in the south parking lot and its noon meal four days a week.

“We predominantly cater to low-income individuals who are food insecure for whatever reason,” Demster said. “But you’ll often see those same people coming to put food in our fridge.”

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“It appears to me that they give back as much as they can,” he said, a fact Demster said he never would have known without seeing the community of people who come to the refrigerators.

“From the fridge to our food-justice ministries, let’s just say there is a core of gratitude in our community that is palpable,” Demster said.

That concern extends to the physical refrigerators themselves.

“These things burn out, operating in these new weather patterns. But the second they burn out, every time we put the call out, we’ve been able to get a new one that day,” he said.

And it is sometimes because people tag him and Abraham in their posts about free, working refrigerators in the city.

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“Once again, it’s just a community effort. People are looking out for each other,” said Demster, who as a result has a used refrigerator in storage, ready for when the next one goes out. “More times than not, the community members who go to the fridge for the food are the ones doing a lot of the maintenance — cleaning it out, you know, doing the upkeep.”

Before 901 Community Fridges launched, Abraham researched refrigerator projects in other cities, including New Orleans.

“I’m always there if someone wants to put in another refrigerator,” Abraham said. “I’m meeting the electricians whenever we have an electrical issue. I’m that person who’s always behind the scenes.”

She is not surprised the effort requires little else.

“When I spoke to the people in New Orleans, they said the community will soon take care of itself,” Abraham said. “That is exactly what has happened.”

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Based on what he sees with the community fridges, Demster said he is surprised there are not more community-based solutions to problems. 

“It’s so uncommon nowadays that we rely on our own community for assistance,” Demster said. “We want to rely on the government or nonprofits. But at the end of the day, in so many cases, we’re not building community in those situations.”

Demster said he’s had plenty of time to watch the people at the First Congo fridge, both the givers and the receivers.

“Everybody stops to chat,” Demster said. “You hear a lot of discussion about what was in there last week. And then it’s, ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘Good to see you guys.’”