1: Things to keep in mind: consistency, empathy, professionalism

We set up our free store next to a needle exchange that had been operating at the same location for a while already, in order to help the people coming to the exchange, many of whom were living on the street or otherwise in dire circumstances, and to help block the needle exchange from some of the negative attention it was receiving from property owners in the area. We learned several things from them that have helped us in running the free store – consistency, empathy and professionalism.

People who are likely to patronize your free store have to be able to rely on you being in the same place at the same time with the same materials. They don't have the time or energy to chase you around and deal with enough uncertainty and randomness in their lives already. Random one-off donations or constantly shifting locations will not be nearly as effective, even if you do hand out the same amount of stuff each time. Focusing on consistency also means that when you're starting out, it's best to only plan on doing something you know you can do for a long time. For us, this meant we started out making a few gallons of coffee, buying a couple dozen pairs of socks, and having some small amount of clothing we'd gathered from donations and some vitamins. We only increased the amount of material we had, and diversified the material we were handing out, when we knew we had additional people and resources on hand to take care of it, and we were reasonably confident we could continue doing that for the foreseeable future. It's best to get out there with whatever you have, consistently, rather than waiting to have a huge pile of stuff.

Actually caring about the people you're interacting with and demonstrating that through listening, conversations, openness, and genuinely integrating them into the life of your group is also very important. Obviously you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't care, but making it clear that you do care requires careful work and can't be assumed. Being available to talk instead of on your phone, or in a closed conversation with your friends, is important. Being interested in someone's life without prying, wanting to know what they think of the distribution so you can improve it, are all things that are communicated through the work of talking to people. By saying this I'm not implying that I or our group in general always demonstrate this 100% of the time. Talking to people for 6 hours can make me more tired than a day of manual labor.

Related to both empathy and consistency is professionalism. It's much easier for everyone if you establish clear rules and divide tasks, so that decision making and labor are spread around multiple people, and no one person feels burdened to make all the decisions or do all the work. Being on time and doing what you say you're going to do are basic requirements for dealing with the public who show up to your free store and the people you're working with to run the free store (both groups will hopefully start to blend over time). Following up on communications you receive is also very important, to get more donations and volunteers, and having a policy for handling outside inquiries might be a good idea to lay down early, so there's no confusion about how someone can respond or what they can say. Deciding how and when to confront cops, angry property owners (the worst), or others opposed to your free store should also be done in a professional way, with careful planning and an eye to preserving the distribution and the purpose of your group in general. In our case, we decided to violate a permit and stay in a public park that had been taken over by a farmer's market, something that is technically illegal, only after discussing it, observing the reaction of the farmers market coordinators and cops and deciding what we would do in any of the possible outcomes.¹

2: How we started

We picked a location near a needle exchange for the reasons I discussed above. We had some ideas about what to hand out there but we reached out to a member of the needle exchange we'd known from previous activism for advice. His suggestions came from a far deeper understanding of the situation of people living on the street than most of us possessed at that time. The decision to hand out anything should be made on the basis of this kind of knowledge, and have a specific purpose, so that you can maximize the usefulness of the stuff you hand out with the resources and time you have available. We started with the following items, for the reasons given:

protein-rich snacks (most cheap food has very little protein)
vitamins (drug addiction and malnutrition resulting from poverty can result in unhealthy vitamin deficiencies)
quality socks (one person we met at a distribution told us “socks are life”)
coffee (we started in December, in the summer we hand out Gatorade and cold water)
hygiene items (tampons and maxi pads, band-aids and packets of antibiotic ointment)
random clothing and blankets we'd buy or have donated

This list changes depending on where you are and what's available around you. We stopped sharing bandaids and ointment when we realized the needle exchange already had more of those than we did, and we didn't bother gathering Naloxone because, again, it was in the needle exchange trailer a few steps away from us. We moved away from snacks when we began handing out food, and we added hot water for tea and hot chocolate when people asked about it. We also started handing out candy because people need quick sugar. The point is to evaluate what you have, what you think people need, and continually improve what you offer so you don't waste time and resources on things people can get elsewhere or don't need. You might have good hunches (in our case, from people with personal experience of homelessness and aid workers who spent a lot of time working with people addicted to drugs) but they have to be confirmed.

3: How we work now

Two years later our distribution is much larger and we've moved our location. We stay with the needle exchange part of the time and break off on our own for part of the time. Both locations are evaluated constantly and we will stop going somewhere if we stop seeing people there. We have a storage unit with some shelving for storing donations and giving people a fixed location to drop off donated items – which saves us time and effort of coordinating donation pickups at multiple locations. We have a crew that focuses on the food we make (quesadillas in the summer, stew in the winter) and another crew that focuses on clothing, hygiene and liquids. We keep track of the donations we receive, what our distributions are costing us (we recently stopped putting chicken in the stew after realizing we could get protein a lot cheaper from beans and rice), and make decisions about how to spend our time and money most effectively. We try to write down policies and guides so that the knowledge of how to run a distribution is shared and more people can find a spot where they fit in. Relying on the same person to do the same thing for too long isn't ideal.

How the distribution is set up is important. We have a couple tables we put things on and we try to be 'around' the tables, not always behind them like we're running a store. A lot of charities are arrogantly, cynically run and reinforce the alienation that people living on the street feel from the rest of society already. Consciously not separating yourself from 'the people' is something we try to keep in mind. People tell us the distributions are islands of calm in the landscape of the city, and we try to respect and maintain that.

The biggest change in our group since we started has been handing out food. When we decided to hand it out, we were thinking about incidents in other cities where cops have poured bleach on food being handed out and arrested people for doing so without their permission. Cops in Salt Lake either don't know or don't care that we do this, even though they are predictably brutal in other ways. As a precaution we had everyone who was involved in the food get food handlers permits and carry them during distributions. Our justification was that we want to do things cleanly and safely anyway, so getting a permit from the health department wasn't much of a compromise. We also started small with the food we made, monitored our budget, and established a separate crew for preparing and delivering the food so it wouldn't overburden others already working on different parts of the distribution. The law, your group's resources and ability to cook and distribute food safely, and the energy you have available after a week of work and everything else should all be considered in the decision to hand out food (a lot of this 'advice' is really obvious but I'm just saying it anyway).

Our group also has political ambitions. We want to confront the things that cause homelessness in our area and change them. This is the most underdeveloped part of the group's activity, despite it occupying a lot of our time and energy. We conduct surveys to learn about the conditions in Salt Lake, and we recently started publishing a street sheet made up from conversations we have with people (we publish things with permission obviously). Forming a solidarity network to help people you meet at distributions, involving your group in protest politics as we do, or nailing severed pigs heads to the front porches of notorious cops or landlords are all options you can explore. Our advice here is much less concrete than in other areas. If you end up doing this for a while, send us your reflections and we can gather more knowledge and add to this document.

4: Summary

A short summary of our group's activity follows:

We have a meeting where we discuss how we're going to run the next distribution and people volunteer for tasks. We talk about the last distribution and how it went and what we can improve, and also the other things we do like surveys, publishing a street sheet, and participating in demonstrations or other political activity. We take notes and post them so people who couldn't make it to the meeting can see them. We try to meet in public if we can get a room somewhere.
Different people prepare different parts of the distribution at home – gathering clothing, bagging vitamins, cooking food etc.
We assemble the materials at one location, the same time and location each time, and stay there for a few hours. We have flyers we distribute with the time and location of our distributions, along with our contact information. We talk to people and let them take what they need, and help them if they ask for it. I take notes on what goes on personally (so I can remember it for the meeting) but you don't have to do that.
We clean up and head home.

1: One of the quotes I kept thinking about when we were discussing staying in the park comes from Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács in his discussion on what it means for communists to break the law. He said “... the law and its calculable consequences are of no greater (if also of no smaller) importance than any other external fact of like with which it is necessary to reckon when deciding upon any definite course of action. The risk of breaking the law should not be regarded any differently than the risk of missing a train connection when on an important journey.” In other words, don't be afraid of breaking the law, or break it for its own sake, but only if it makes sense based on your circumstances, and then don't make a big deal out of it. From “Legality and Illegality” in History and Class Consciousness, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/ch06.htm