My Recycled Life — Take What You Need, Give What You Can

“Take what you need, give what you can,” is the concept behind the Little Free Pantry, a spin on the Little Free Library and its “Take a book, share a book” concept. The Little Free Library provides a way to exchange books, while the Little Free Pantry provides a way to exchange food and household items.

At the littlefreepantry.org website, you may read, “The mini pantry movement activates neighbor engagement with food insecurity. The mini pantry movement is a grassroots, crowdsourced solution to immediate and local needs. Whether a need for food or a need to give, mini pantries help feed neighbors, nourishing neighborhoods.”

According to the website, “Jessica McClard launched the grassroots mini pantry movement in May 2016 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when she planted the Little Free Pantry Pilot, a wooden box on a post, containing food, personal care, and paper items accessible to everyone all the time, no questions asked. She hoped her spin on the Little Free Library concept would pique local awareness of food insecurity” and what she started has become a global movement.

Further, the website declares, “We are not an organization, and we are not a nonprofit. We are neighbors.” Any individual, or a church or community organization, may build and maintain a Little Free Pantry. You may find one local example at:

Our Savior’s Lutheran Church,
370 Junipero Avenue,
Long Beach, CA 90814.

Anyone is free to take or leave food and other panty-type essentials.

Taking a look at examples online, you’ll see that most often, a Little Free Pantry is the same kind of structure—boxes on posts—as a Little Free Library. If you want to build and maintain one, you can DIY it from scratch or from a kit purchased online. Some are even constructed from repurposed objects, ranging from newsstands to phone booths to toy buses.

Obviously, while a Little Free Library is stocked with books, which any bibliophile is going to have a surplus of, and which don’t have shelf dates, keeping a Little Free Pantry stocked is more complicated. This is where having the entire community involved becomes beneficial. The more people who are able to keep the pantry stocked with surplus or unwanted food, toiletries, and household goods, the better.

I’m thinking, that next avocado-harvest season, I may contribute some of my backyard fruit to a Little Free Pantry. I may even install one myself.