Welcome to our Learning Out Loud blog series, where we’ll be taking you with us on the journey of creating a more connected neighbourhood. As we share the joys and challenges of building community, we hope to hear back from others engaged in similar efforts to develop a practice of exchange, reflection and action.

In this blog, we are reflecting on the journey of The Community Fridge initiative, which operated from the Walworth Living Room between 2022 and 2023. A legacy of the emergency food hub that we created during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Fridge offered surplus food to anyone who needed it, reducing food waste in the process. 

Walworth is one of the most deprived areas in Southwark, and even before the pandemic, nearly a quarter (25%) of residents were food insecure, with black residents (46%) more impacted than white residents (9%), (Southwark Council, 2019). The spread of Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis put even more of a strain on already struggling households. 

Our emergency food hub responded directly to an urgent need, delivering over 40,000 parcels in just over a year. Once it ended, the Living Room continued to hold a weekly community brunch, and the Fridge became an additional source of support for the neighbourhood, eventually also becoming a social space where the neighbourhood could access other resources such as Rose Vouchers, digital support and later, the Southwark Wellbeing Hub. As vital as this space was, the Fridge also gave rise to questions and tensions about how people related to one another and the Walworth Living Room. 

Some of these questions were practical: how much should people take, and how to assess needs that might be greater than others? More sensitive questions followed: If there were some people unable to eat the food on offer, was it okay for them to take and sell it on to purchase food specific to their culture? How to curb an imbalance of power between volunteers and users? How to maintain a sense of justice and dignity for people whose basic needs were not being met? 

Truthfully, these are questions we struggled to address in the moment, and are still struggling with now. A particular challenge was acknowledging and managing the feelings of anger, bitterness and resentment that doesn’t fit into romantic ideas around community-building. We want to be frank about these experiences—  not as failures, but as an appreciation of the long and often messy path to building and maintaining inclusive community spaces. People are complex, and our interactions can be as awkward and strained as they are wonderful and exciting. 

While we continue to work through these questions, we picked up some learnings along the way:

• We want to get better at deep listening. It’s hard to admit that our long-term visions for the neighbourhood sometimes clashed with the immediate needs of the people we were interacting with daily. Rather than let these ideals overshadow their daily experiences, we care about understanding and then being responsive to the different perspectives, motivations and hopes of the community. 

• We won’t shy away from difficult feelings and situations. We work through conflict rather than avoid them. In a training session on building inclusive spaces with Felicity Reed earlier this year, we discussed ways of having brave conversations in the Walworth Living Room, and dealing with conflict with curiosity in order to strengthen connection. Of course, this returns us to the importance of learning how to listen deeply. 

• It’s okay for our projects to change direction. The issues and tensions that arise within a project might signal a need for change. As the activist adrienne maree brown has shared “….when something breaks down in our communities, it’s actually a moment, usually, when something needs nourishing”. This nourishment requires time to listen and reflect.

Unfortunately funding constraints and the refurbishment of All Saints Hall put a pause on The Community Fridge. Now that we have reopened, we are holding discussions about its future and how to embed these lessons. Our conversations now involve more questions such as: what does sustainable food look like in the Living Room? How can we connect food to other areas in our life such as housing, health, and culture? 

We know that whatever answers and changes we land on, The Fridge has to be community-led. 

We would love to hear from you if you have any thoughts about our learnings. Maybe you have responses to our questions! We are especially eager to other community groups and organisations eager to learn together. Please get in touch with Nikita if so.