After a summer spent lugging 130-pound batteries, calculating surface area measurements and digging a 100-foot-long trench through the former foundation of a house: It was time. Keyante Aytch was ready to plug in a refrigerator.
The fridge, located in the Libations to the Ancestors garden in Englewood, had been without power since November. It is one of more than 20 refrigerators across Chicago that allow community members to provide and access food. But a year after this one was installed, in November 2020, it lost power.
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“We knew that site was important,” said Eric Von Haynes, a core organizer with the Love Fridge network. “So it became pertinent to figure out how to get it back up and running.”
Aytch, president of the startup company Sunbend Solar, proposed a solution: solar panels.
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The big moment came on Aug. 27, the day before the fridge and its new electrical accouterment was set to be revealed to the community. Aytch knelt behind the teal, pink and orange structure housing the gray refrigerator. He plugged in the appliance.
And nothing happened.
He remembers thinking that if this was a TV show, a “dun, dun, dun” sound of doom would play. His heart sank.
He soon figured it out. It was a new outlet and he needed to press one of the tiny buttons in the center to start it.
The fridge turned on, powered by the solar panels on top of a nearby shipping container.
The Love Fridge was back.
The Englewood Love Fridge can be found at 6344 S. Morgan St., just a few blocks away from a Whole Foods. The grocery store is set to close its doors on Nov. 13 after opening in 2016, then touted as a way to bring quality food options to the neighborhood.
Englewood has one of Chicago’s highest rates of food insecurity, according to data from the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Demand for food resources has always been high in the neighborhood, said Taryn Randle, co-founder of the Getting Grown Collective, the organization that planted the garden that the Love Fridge sits on. Interventions like a high-priced grocery store don’t necessarily improve access, they said.
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[ As Whole Foods prepares to leave Englewood, food leaders are planning ahead. ‘We need more options.’ ]
The fridge aims to act not as a vendor but as a conduit between existing resources and the people in the community to eliminate waste. Now, with inflation increasing household costs, the need for accessible, quality food options has never been higher, Haynes said.
“We’re offering space for people to help each other while there’s a grocery store literally a couple blocks away that’s not in a lot of ways,” Haynes said.
The fridge first started in 2020, powered by an extension cord hanging out a window from a house next door, Aytch said. Getting Grown Collective would pay the homeowners for the electricity used.
After a restock, the fridge could be empty again within an hour, Randle said.
For the collective, the fridge ensures that food products don’t go to waste. If an organization had extra meals, it provides a safe place to store it. It also extends the shelf life of their fresh produce, which used to wilt by the end of the day when placed outside for neighbors to collect. The Love Fridge organization also refills the fridge with food collected through several mutual aid channels.
By November 2021, Randle said they couldn’t pay the electricity bill, so they unplugged the fridge. During the winter, people still used the fridge for storage, as it was kept cool by the Chicago temperatures. But by spring, they had to put up a sign stating that the fridge was off.
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“People would always ask when it was coming back on, and we just started telling people we’re trying to get a solar panel,” Randle said.
“What?” was the usual response Randle received.
The Love Fridge’s long-term vision has always included solar energy, Haynes said. The goal is to create sustainable sites for communities to fulfill their mission that “food is a right, not a privilege.”
Aytch received his solar power certification in 2020 and started the company Sunbend Solar in 2021. The Love Fridge project cost around $15,000, Aytch said, and was funded through grants received by the Love Fridge and Getting Grown Collective.
Aytch compares the technicalities of the solar operation to a human body. The panels on the roof act as lungs, “inhaling” energy that goes to an inverter, which operates like a brain, determining where and when to send the energy. Then the energy goes to a battery bank, comparable to a heart. These batteries send power to the fridge through wires that traverse the garden about 18 inches underground.
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Because the system uses batteries to store energy, the fridge can function on its own for at least three days if there was no energy coming in. In the winter, the main point of maintenance will be keeping the surface area of the panels cleared of snow, Aytch said.
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Haynes said the Love Fridge network hopes to expand the use of solar to other fridges in order to reach people where they’re at, instead of where there is preexisting electricity.
“It allows us to work with more community gardens, to even get off the beaten path where houseless individuals may be near,” he said.
Right now, the network has plenty of food, with two warehouses to store it, Haynes said. But the organization is always hoping to expand its volunteer pool to prevent burnout. Haynes said some volunteers have worked in the network for two years now, devoting large amounts of time, something the organization is grateful for.
“But when we talk about sustainability, it also means in the capacity for humans to do this stuff, too,” he said. “That’s also part of making a sustainable network.”
Already in Englewood, the addition of the solar panels has increased interest in the operation, Randle said.
“More folks are volunteering to clean the refrigerator out than they were before,” they said. “There’s a different appreciation for it now, after experiencing it not being there.”
