Our Mission
1 Freedom for All’s mission is to teach youth of color to identify and stand in their own power, while addressing food insecurity in their immediate communities. Youth activists use the tools of organizing, popular education, culture and the arts, to create grassroots systemic change to achieve food justice.
Our Vision:
Our Vision is to create a multi-generational, youth-led movement to address the current unjust food system and provide healthy and accessible food options in our local food apartheid neighborhoods of the South Bronx.
How we got our start
In 2017, 1 Freedom for All (1 Freedom) co-founders, Hector Gerardo and Elizabeth Guerra worked in coalition to bring the arts, culture and activism to South Bronxites through Saturday classes at the Andrew Freedman home -- a community space, in the heart of the South Bronx. They recruited participants from the surrounding schools, after school programs, churches, train stations and bus stops. Every Saturday, they worked with a group of fifty people – young people and their caretakers (parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, foster parents, etc.) -- to teach them the importance of organizing for change and campaign development. Participants also taught Hector and Elizabeth- about the importance of passing the baton onto younger generations, developing their leadership and in turn building a base of engaged community members. It was clear -- folks loved the arts, and learning ways to express themselves using a spectrum of art forms, but knew that they didn’t have access to a program like the one Elizabeth and Hector created in their own schools. In August 2017, Hector and Elizabeth did just that – pulling together various resources, community members, friends and family, they created 1 Freedom for All. Hector and Elizabeth knew their experience in the Spring with members of the South Bronx community was a need that had to be met collectively.
Working in partnership with FPWA, 1 Freedom trained over 100 young people in 2017 & 2018 on the principles of organizing and launched a campaign to create food alternatives in NYC public schools.
1Freedom — in collaboration with a collective of organizers, organizations and community members in the Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights —created a Steering Committee focused on creating a solution for the issues that our youth activists voiced. The Steering Committee ensured that the voices of the youth were front and center. After two months of planning and tireless fundraising, 1 Freedom launched a summer youth education and organizing program, Summer Youth Brigade (SYB) in August. SYB created an educational platform where youth learned to take the lead in the movement for food justice.
The vision of this community-supported, youth-led, program is as follows:
Mutual aid: approximately three refrigerators, were purchased, decorated, and placed on the street and are open and available to anyone who needs food. SYB organizers restock and maintain these “solidarity fridges,” located in their community. These fridges serve as a community bulletin board, populated with information about happenings in their community and in the world.
Youth-led Organizing: Youth built and cultivated community relationships necessary to support and operate “solidarity fridges” in their neighborhoods, with partners (like tenants associations, urban gardens, restaurants, nonprofits and local organizations).
Popular Education: 1Freedom provided the platform and support for Youth Organizers to ask questions, investigate, and present their findings around issues they see in the NYC food system and in their lives. Youth Organizers participated in skills-based workshops, discussions around systematic oppression in our food system, and studied the central role of food in social movements in resisting and re-imagining our society.
Since August through our community fridges we have:
Provided groceries for over 1,500 families
Received thousands of pounds of food donations from community organizations, supermarkets, and restaurants
Engaged with over 30 community-based organizations and local businesses embedded into the fabric of Harlem, Washington Heights, the Bronx (like RAP4Bronx, Players Alliance, La Morada Restaurant)
Created 3 local community networks to help support 1 Freedom Solidarity Fridges
Most importantly, we acknowledge these fridges are a starting point for many people to discuss the larger systemic issues that impact youth, specifically in West Bronx of food and housing uncertainty that is experienced by young people and community members at-large in the Bronx. The fridges are a program of 1Freedom, used to organize impacted communities throughout NYC at the intersection of food justice and the school-to-prison pipeline.
