Campus & Community
The light in the refrigerator
RVA Community Fridges founder Taylor Scott (B.S.’19) brings fresh produce, a nearly irrepressible optimism and newfound nonprofit status to Richmond’s food fight.
The first one went up easily enough and, frankly, without a plan whatsoever: Taylor Scott (B.S.’19) was growing too many vegetables, a friend had an old refrigerator and a nearby business was willing to share its sidewalk electrical outlet.
The fridge got made over in rainbow sherbet hues, with “FREE FOOD” painted at the top, and opened to the public in Richmond’s Church Hill in January 2021, an oasis of fresh produce from Scott and others. Anyone could take what they needed or add to the bounty.
To Scott, it seemed the fridge would practically run itself. So when someone asked her if there would be more fridges, she remembers thinking, “Sure, why not?”
By the end of that summer there were six, with requests still for more, and a realization for Scott that the demand for accessible food was bigger than her intended laissez-faire approach could provide. That’s when she finally paused to wonder where all this food would come from — and then she set up three more fridges by December.
Nearly three years later, with 15 fridges (all in Richmond except for one in South Chesterfield) and three more in the works, the uncertainty over how to fill Scott’s RVA Community Fridges has been replaced with an orchestrated whirl of volunteer coordinators and stockists and cooks and veggie-harvesters, and by partnerships with local farms and restaurants that donate much of the food. And the operation is continually branching in the direction of need: There’s pantry storage alongside many of the fridges and a garden plot in the Broad Rock Community Garden. Early in 2024, the organization partnered with the local chapter of Food Not Bombs to open a community kitchen in Brookland Park called Matchbox Mutual Aid, which Scott’s group now uses to assemble fridge-bound prepared meals.
This past summer, RVA Community Fridges became a federal tax-exempt nonprofit, which makes donations to the organization tax deductible and expands its possibilities for grant funding and access to more food.
“We’re seeing a rise in need,” Scott says, “but we’re also in a position to ask for more.”
Taylor Scott, pictured at Sankofa Community Orchard in Richmond's Southside. — Photo by Jud Froelich (M.S.’21)
In a city where 13.5% of households in 2022 reported they sometimes didn’t have enough food, according to the national food bank network Feeding America, Scott says that many of her fridges are empty within an hour of announcing on social media that they’ve been restocked. And she’s increasingly hearing from people who come away empty-handed.
Reading those messages, she says, are the sole moments when she feels daunted by the scale of the city’s hunger.
“In that second, I think, Wow, I wish there was more I can do,” Scott says. “But in the next split second I’m literally like, Welp, time to go find some more food, because, honestly, sitting here and being like, ‘Ah, I wish there was more,’ is not going to help.And if I can’t get the food, then maybe I need to find a way to educate people on how to grow their own, or we need to find a way to get the food to them.
“I just am one of [those] people that’s like, ‘I can make it happen,’” she says with a laugh. “That’s how we got here.”
Scott, who came to VCU from New Orleans hoping to find a path to the FBI and now has a tattoo of parsley on her forearm, became her organization’s lone full-timer in January 2023, buttressed by a half-dozen lead volunteers who help run the operation. In 2024, she was recognized in Richmond magazine’s annual Best and Worst rankings as the city’s “best humanitarian or nonprofit warrior” and was named the Richmond YWCA’s Rising Outstanding Woman.
Richmond is already served by a longstanding regional food bank, Feed More, and local food distribution programs — pieces of what John C. Jones, Ph.D., an assistant professor in VCU’s Center for Environmental Studies, calls the “emergency food system.” In recent years, likely fueled by the pandemic, a surge of community refrigerators and pantries nationwide have joined their ranks. They include 13 mini-pantries at VCU run by Jones as part of a research study, and his planned network of campus fridges, inspired by Scott’s work. (Separately, the university also operates the student-serving Ram Pantry.)
Jones warns that community fridges and pantries, while undoubtedly helpful, are “just another type of Band-Aid on the broken food system that exists in our country,” which requires political will and public policy to actually mend. “The United States produces more than enough food to feed our entire population, yet somehow there is significant food insecurity for many of our citizens.”
Scott, who came to VCU from New Orleans hoping to find a path to the FBI and now has a tattoo of parsley on her forearm, became the organization’s lone full-timer in January 2023, buttressed by a half-dozen lead volunteers who today manage a small empire of community refrigerators around Richmond. — Photo by Jud Froelich (M.S.’21)
Scott, too, knows this isn’t a solution for chronic hunger. She would like to see the fridges become less essential and more self-sufficient — a more casual, take-an-apple-leave-an-apple exchange. She concedes that’s unlikely, though. As it is, her organization has two dozen requests for additional refrigerators.
How many fridges would be sustainable? “Honestly, I would’ve told you 10, and now I’m at 14,” she says. It hinges on the community’s capacity to muster resources, which so far — even though donations weren’t tax-deductible until this summer — has left Scott astonished. “That’s how supportive everyone is; they’re doing this because it’s right.”
In the meantime, she and her team manage an empire of fridges that suffer the elements, that “age out” of service, that sometimes have their extension cords taken. Once, an entire fridge disappeared.
But the fridges also sometimes are the recipients of the same type of anonymous kindness they offer. In August, strips of Velcro mysteriously appeared on the fridge and freezer doors of the unit at Six Points Innovation Center in North Highland Park, which were struggling to stay shut. It’s a vigilante repair that Scott says likely ensures the fridge will stay operable through the winter.
“I don’t know who did that,” she says. “That’s what I’m saying, see? They do things like that and I’m like: I love you. Y’all are the best.”
