After the community fridge of free food outside the Howard Mohr Community Center closed earlier this month, the Forest Park volunteers who launched it in 2023 are looking for its new home.
On Sept. 16, the Forest Park Fridge announced on Facebook that it was closing the community refrigerator due to operational challenges that did not make the fridge sustainable.
“We had so much traffic coming to the fridge, and the community center had a lot of traffic coming and going, and it got to the point where we knew we needed to move somewhere else,” Maria Maxham told the Review.
Maxham, who is commissioner of accounts and finance, opened the fridge in 2023 with Village Administrator Rachell Entler, Meghan Hunt and Monique Cotton Yancy, who’s on the District 91 school board. The fridge was a volunteer effort and not a village-led initiative.
“We decided to start it because other towns were doing it. It seemed like something that would work really well in Forest Park, and we knew there was a need,” Maxham said.
The four women were having a hard time finding a location to host the fridge. But Karen Dylewski, then the director of the Howard Mohr Community Center, said Forest Park Fridge would nicely supplement the community center’s food pantry. The community center’s internal food pantry is still open and operating, and Forest Park locals must show proof of residency to receive food.
Though the volunteers haven’t yet found a new location for the fridge, they’re talking with an Oak Park group that manages fridges of free food in their village to see if they can help find Forest Park Fridge a new location or share ideas on how to maintain the refrigerator.
“We’re potentially looking for another location in Forest Park, but we don’t have any concrete plans at this time for that,” Maxham said.
Brenda Powers — who was assistant director of the community center and is acting director after Dylewski retired in January — told the Review that over the years, there have been multiple incidents of illegal behavior involving some people who access the community fridge. She said she’s called the authorities several times.
“A lot of people use it, and it was a great thing. It’s just not very helpful to have it 10 feet away from the door of a daycare center,” Powers said of the community fridge. “We close the window that’s directly next to [the fridge], but we shouldn’t have to do that anymore. This is a daycare center; we need to let the light in.”
Though the refrigerator will no longer sit outside the community center, there is still a pantry inside — and certainly a need for such a resource in Forest Park.
“There were so many people that would come and bring food, and also so many people that needed food. I saw the need, anecdotally, growing over the past few years,” Maxham said. “As soon as we put food in there, it would be gone probably within an hour. Sometimes there would be people waiting while we put food in.”
But even if the Forest Park Fridge returns, it can only feed so many people.
“I think that the whole issue of homelessness and people not having food to eat is so much bigger than what a community fridge can solve,” Maxham said. “It makes me really sad that all we can do as a society is put band-aids on the situation.”