Food Not Bombs Toledo May 2021
Food Not Bombs is a loose-knit group of independent collectives worldwide, sharing free vegan and vegetarian food with others. Food Not Bombs’ ideology is that myriad corporate and government priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance.
Food Not Bombs Toledo Newsletter
May 2021
In this issue:
Spring & Summer Updates
Mutual Aid & Harm Reduction
It has been an exciting month for Food Not Bombs! The week of April 8th, we moved into our new kitchen space at Scottwood and Delaware in the Old West End. We are cooking in a house known as the “FlambOWEnce House. The owners of the home seek to make the first floor accessible for use by community groups and will include an art gallery space and more. So far everything is going great, and we are so excited to be there!
With the warming weather and rising vaccination rates, we are also getting back out into the community to cater free meals in person at community events. On April 18th we provided food for two wonderful events. In the morning, we served breakfast outside the ZEPF center alongside the Northwest Ohio Syringe Service’s (NOSS) Street team. Later in the day, we served at The Land Cooperative near Highland Park in South Toledo, where Katie & Beth Kuntz-Wineland are facilitating the restoration of the wooded area to benefit the community and local ecology. In May we will be continuing Thursday deliveries. We also warmly invite anyone to join us at 2472 Collingwood from 5:30–7:30 on Thursday evenings to volunteer in the garden, or just grab a meal or groceries and hang out for conversation around the fire. We look forward to seeing more of you this spring!
Mutual Aid & Harm Reduction
Allison Egan with the NOSS Street Team
The covid 19 pandemic has been many things: tragic, gut-wrenching and highly politicized. It brought out the worst in a lot of people, but it also brought out the humanity in many more. The pandemic became the catalyst that brought mutual aid (the term as well as the concept) to the mainstream. Mutual aid involves a voluntary exchange of resources for collective benefit. It is not charity. It is normally people pooling together resources (money, food, etc) rather than relying on grant money or government assistance, while working to transform systems that perpetuate poverty and oppression.
Alongside the covid 19 pandemic, is the ever-growing opioid epidemic. What was already a huge issue, especially in our part of the country, has gotten exponentially worse due to covid. Ohio’s rate of overdose deaths has tripled since 2010, and it is currently more than double the national rate. We rank #31 in drug use, but #2 nationwide for overdose death. This was made much worse by covid 19. Between closed borders (making the importing of drugs nearly impossible) which increased the synthetic drugs that already poison the street drug supply, isolation, lack of in-person meetings and other addiction/recovery services, we saw a huge surge in overdose deaths.
Getting involved with grass roots harm reduction was already something I was personally very interested in doing, but now I knew it was something that required immediate action. I was sick of saying “Someone needs to do something about this’’ and I decided to actually do it, of course with the help of some wonderfully compassionate folks. In the midst of the protests in summer 2020, I helped facilitate a “street medic” course. I included Narcan education, but did not have the physical medication to distribute. We were connected with NOSS (Northwest Ohio Syringe Services) shortly after this class. Courtney Stewart came out and did a class for free, supplying narcan as well as fentanyl test strips to everyone that attended the class. It was then that a few of us decided we should start a “street team”. We did our first distro on the fourth of July, and that was the beginning of a very beautiful, very successful outreach program. We are affiliated with, but not employed by NOSS. It is 100% volunteer based. We go out into the community every weekend (sometimes weekdays) and either do a drive up distro, or walk around giving it out for free. We hit up “hot spots” (areas that have surges in overdose) as determined by the local fire department, as well as treatment facilities, and local events such as drug take back day. We exchange used syringes, smoking, and snorting supplies for fresh ones, along with free narcan and fentanyl test strips, safe syringe disposal, HIV and HepC testing, and connect people to addiction and recovery services in our area.
Food not Bombs already has a strong partnership with NOSS. Food Not Bombs provides hot meals every Thursday for NOSS clinic participants. Providing warm meals to people not only feeds their bellies, but their souls. Feeling that someone cares for you can make all the difference and has been beneficial for everyone involved. Food Not Bombs has also provided food at other NOSS street team events, and is always a draw! The most important thing in all of this though, is the community. People need community. They need to feel cared for and welcome, and helping others often gives people purpose that may have otherwise been lost. Out motto at NOSS is “The opposite of addiction is connection”. We connect to people in our community who are often cast aside by society, and we all need connection more than ever.
