Tiny Purple Pantry & Community Renewal

The story of the Tiny Purple Pantries starts when I saw the lines at the food pantries in my neighborhood grow longer and longer. So many people are now unemployed, hungry or homeless because of this pandemic and the pride or shame someone might feel having to join that line for the first time felt very real. I also thought about the amount of food my family wastes on a weekly basis and wondered if there was an easy, no-contact, anonymous way to share our abundance with those who could use it.

Inspired by the mini libraries I've seen pop up, I decided to make some small wooden boxes. I've put up 30 pantries now in Brooklyn and Queens and filled them on a regular basis. Now I've moved to Trenton, NJ and want to continue the project here in a fresh way. I teach at Paul Robeson Middle School in Trenton. My 7th-grade students are designing and building pantries and other community service projects. My vision of teaching math through real applications and using those to benefit the community is finally coming to fruition. We're using geometry, algebra, proportions, percents, budgeting, taxes and scale factor to make blueprints and scale models to build our pantries.

I know there are systemic injustices that need to be addressed when so many people go hungry in such a wealthy nation. Those absolutely should be addressed, but in the meantime, a family on your block is going hungry tonight and you don't know about it. Furthermore, not only do they stave off hunger for a small number of our neighbors, but it also brings the community together in a way I couldn't have imagined. Kindness and connection are bursting out of people. This pandemic has made us all hungry for community and this is a nice way to rebuild those broken bridges.