Name: Charlotte Vitale

Social Justice Group: Food insecurity in NYC (B)

Date of Fieldwork: January 18, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Food Not Bombs

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

Me and one other member of my group volunteered with Food not Bombs, an organization made entirely by mutual aid that has existed since the 1970s. We volunteered in Bedford Stuyvesant with a group of people who volunteer weekly. Some of them cook food and others get day-old food from different stores around the city. Many of the people who volunteered took home food with them. This is a form of mutual aid, a system where people help others but they also help themselves. They might be feeding other people but eating at the same time. Food not bombs has existed for over 50 years and has helped many people. One of them being my dad Alex Vitale, in the 1990s he volunteered with food not bombs by cooking and rescuing food but he also did not have a lot of money and so he ate the food as well

When I got to the place that I volunteered at, there was already a line forming of locals who come every week. They would ask for a ticket that would signify the place that they would stand in line and wait for us to set up. You could sometimes see the shame on peoples faces when they asked for food. It was heartbreaking for me to understand how hard it is to ask for help, and the amount of bravery it takes to ask for help. This is why mutual aid is so great because many of the people helping are suffering from the same things and won’t look down on you for needing help.