7/30/2021 Foundry Giving Friday: Phillips Community Free Store
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Every Friday The Foundry Home Goods donates 5% of our total sales to a different community-nominated small-and-mighty cause. This Friday's Foundry Giving Friday recipient? Phillips Community Free Store!
The Phillips Community Free Store is exactly what it sounds like...and more. It's a "store" that provides 174 families (and counting!) in the Phillips neighborhood with weekly groceries groceries and household items—fresh produce, diapers, menstrual products, cooking supplies and so on...for free. Completely funded by mutual aid and in-kind donations, the Phillips Community Free Store also envisions and enacts a radically egalitarian solution: replacing scarcity and fear with abundance and community support.
Luz Cruz, writer and worker in the Phillips Community Free Store collective says it best (and we recommend reading their whole piece on the Store origin, mission, and future here):
"Mutual aid at its essence gives communities the opportunity to self-determine and organize in the ways that allow everyone to live a dignified life. Unlike charity, which tends to involve a one-way dynamic—as organizations enter neighborhoods dictating their own agendas, mutual aid is reciprocal, inherently political, self-organized, and egalitarian. It often involves direct action and is rooted in a desire for social transformation. Whether it involves the distribution of seeds and plants, groceries, or medical supplies, mutual aid also takes place outside of systems of governance that silence the marginalized, and it is based on the understanding that communities have the power to dictate the world they want to live in."
If you don't need anything from us, please consider donating directly to support the Phillips Community Free Store here (there are also volunteer opportunities and instructions on in-kind donations here if that's more your vibe!).
If you do find yourself in need of beeswax or fresh linens, know that your purchase goes to support good change happening on the community level.
Thanks to Calla for the nomination direction!
If YOU have a worthy cause to nominate for our Foundry Giving Friday initiative, pop on over to our Nomination Page and drop us a line. We're all in this together.
Header image by Anne Lehman (she/they), a brilliant Minneapolis-based mixed-media illustrator, and is also available on these sick t-shirts, with 100% of the proceeds going to the Phillips Community Free Store and ZACAH.
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