When I first moved to Orlando in 2018 to attend the University of Central Florida (Go Knights!), I felt disconnected from the Central Florida community.
For those looking from the outside, Orlando is a vacation or retiree destination. It’s International Drive, Universal, Disney, FunSpot, and the MCO terminal where you hear Mayor Buddy Dyer welcome visitors to the City Beautiful. Orlando is not seen as a place to start your life, elevate your career, or build community. It’s where you go to get a break away from work. But to the 2.6 million metro area of different classes, ages, races, people, cities, and towns that form what it is today, Orlando is home.
And I soon set out to find my political home here. When I finally found places to get involved politically in campaigns or registered student organizations, my itch for relationship-building and community connection was slightly fulfilled—but not fully. I wanted a space where it didn’t feel like I was in a constant cycle every 1-2-4 years with local, state, and federal politics and was very limited in time and space for what could be done.
Living here, it is easy to feel that there are no spaces for support as Republican rule pushes policies that do not support our communities and our basic needs. But I grew up low-income in a majority-white town outside of Pittsburgh, where it was complex and stigmatizing to find support without strings attached. Often, support was tied to religious institutions rather than community members themselves. I found Orlando to be more diverse in people and thought, and felt encouraged to seek community in mutual aid support groups.
Voter suppression and apathy left me feeling more depleted, so while I still believed it was important, I decided to organize outside electoral politics, too, and intentionally diversify how I show up in my activism. I joined nonhierarchical spaces that focused on mutuality, whether that was through fundraising for LGBTQ+ folks or peer support.
I learned about many different grassroots organizations whose goals weren’t just to rally, canvass for votes, or one-sided asks for money, but to show up and serve communities outside of getting out the vote or battling a hostile state legislature. To build community beyond election cycles.
I know my story isn’t unique. Replace Orlando with your city and its descriptors and I’m sure you’ll find it is easy to relate. Which means it’s probably also easy to find this kind of organizing in your own community, if you know where to look.
I had the chance to interview three amazing organizations in the Central Florida area that support their neighbors and communities through food justice, mutual aid, education, and community building. Their stories are instrumental and empowering and led me to reflect more on my experience in movement work and its power to change lives.
The stories and work of Blue Trunk Community, Las Semillas, and the Neighborhood Fridge will inspire you to reach out to those in your community who have similar efforts or to build something of your own. Mutual Aid teaches us how to have a better world that fulfills our needs and that our status quo doesn’t have to continue.
Blue Trunk Community Network in Saint Cloud, Florida
When Hurricane Maria impacted Puerto Rico, Blue Trunk Community Network founder Itiba Leonoris Contreas and a network of other community members came together to provide emergency management recovery resources to their Puerto Rican neighbors who lost power and food.
From there, Blue Trunk Community Network started community gardens to serve fresh produce and food in Florida. They provide monthly workshops with local mutual aid organization Central Florida Mutual Aid Network, host sustainability workshops on food sovereignty, horticulture, agriculture, and recycling, plant accessible flower beds for those with disabilities, the aging communities, and young families, and organize an annual food drive.
Although Blue Trunk Community Network doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar building, it focuses on networking with the general community to hold space for its work. One of the benefits of community gardening, Itibia explained, can be the creation of third spaces – a place for socializing and community-building that’s separate from home or work.
“We look for relationships, businesses, and community members that are okay with making their own space a third space. We are supporting their space by helping them create gardens and have other sustainability needs accomplished,” they shared.
Las Semillas in Pine Hills, Florida
During the 2020 pandemic, organizers including Executive Director and founder of Las Semillas, Seven Charlestin, were trying to find resources for the community while many were struggling during an uneasy and unprecedented time.
Las Semillas, colloquially known as the Seeds of Pine Hills, is a mutual aid network that consists of 17 organizations, six churches, six schools, four apartment complexes, and two private businesses that work together to serve people who live in Pine Hills, a Majority-Minority neighborhood in Orange County, Florida with over 83,000 people.
Seven was working with local artists on a mural art project in the center of Pine Hills, but they didn’t realize it would become a turning point for the organization’s existence.
“When trying to beautify the neighborhood and trying to make something that would be the expression of the neighborhood, we got backlash from folks who didn’t really live in the neighborhood and have a vested interest in Pine Hills,” Seven said.
Halfway through the mural project, a woman approached the group from the Opportunity Zones Committee, which was funded by a tax initiative passed under the Trump Administration’s Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. She started to share her beautification vision to make Pine Hills more attractive to businesses – which apparently did not include the mural.
“They gave us a list of things they wanted us to paint. They told us we could either paint it or risk the wall getting knocked down or possible litigation,” explained Seven.
But Las Semillas had a contract with the local business owner of the building they were working on and had paid out of pocket for the project. They finished the mural, but in the Spring of 2024, the mural wall was destroyed. Pressure from Pine Hills residents led to Orange County Government officials allowing the group to repaint the wall.
For Seven, the mural incident exposed why it was important for people living in Pine Hills to build local power, its own institutions, cultural identity, and representation. People were yearning for these support systems in Pine Hills, as distrust exists between the county government and those residing in Pine Hills. And Las Semillas is here to stay and put community members first.
Neighborhood Fridge in Orlando, Florida
In 2019, Kat Franco, the founder of Neighborhood Fridge, was considering relocating to Brooklyn. She’d heard about the New York City borough’s different community resources, such as food kitchens, food fridges, and mutual aid networks. Because of her upbringing in the Dominican Republic as a child of a single mother who had to make ends meet on her own, she was interested in direct aid and how it can be used to support communities and alleviate hardships. She asked her journalist friends if Florida had anything similar.
“My friend sent me this article a few months later about this project doing the same thing [as Brooklyn] in South Florida with ten refrigerators,” Kat said.
Because of COVID-19 and layoffs, Kat remained in Orlando, volunteering for mutual aid organizations and organizations that supported the trans community. She committed to doing research about her community for two years, learning about community fridges and networks, and working with other organizations involved in the food justice movement, including the Central Florida Mutual Aid Network, People’s Free Kitchen, and Blue Trunk Community. In 2023, Kat wanted to do more and worked part-time for the Neighborhood Fridge.
Through the Central Florida Mutual Aid Network, she met a woodworker named Emmanuel who helped her build a shed for the Neighborhood Fridge. The abortion fund organization, Florida Access Network, paid $500 for the shed materials, and a community member donated a fridge. Sean Nelson, a laundromat business owner who wanted to be more involved in community work allowed the Fridge to be set up in the back of his business.
“He said we could set up a fridge in the back of his laundromat on Edgewater because it was a big houseless community population. We set up the shed and got permission from the landlord. We did a call for artists to paint the shed with our brand colors and logos,” said Kat – giving a picture of all of the different community members’ work that went into this project.
“It was such a beautiful thing to watch come together because all of these community members made this possible. People came out, donated food, hygiene items, baby formula. Florida Access Network filled [the fridge] with reproductive justice products and pamphlets.”
Kat said the Neighborhood Fridge’s purpose is to limit any obstacles that would prevent someone from accessing the food or necessities they need. She noticed how people sometimes felt exploited when requesting assistance from government or non-profit programs.
“We wanted to have a tool or space, or a hub, where people can have access to all these different resources or all these basic human essentials without having to sign paperwork or have a language barrier. Sometimes people have really crazy work schedules, and they don’t have the opportunity to make it to a food bank that’s going to be closed at a certain time,” she explained.
Mutual aid organizations fulfill a big need, but funding doesn’t always come easy
Many barriers exist nationwide between communities and the resources they need. Itibia noted the rising cost of living and how housing and food have increased for the working class and people with disabilities.
Last year, Florida was named as a hotspot for inflation. Homelessness has increased in Orlando by 23 percent over the last year, meanwhile measures in the City of Orlando and Florida have criminalized houselessness, only increasing burdens on the community.
“A lot of our community members who are homeless or borderline about to lose their homes are working-class people or disabled people with money coming in, but the cost of living has been so arduous that it doesn’t sustain them,” explained Itibia.
Itiba has recognized that the need for food drives has only increased, and Blue Trunk Community Network has had to give more resources in different areas in the Central Florida metro region, where typically they wouldn’t need to.
Maintaining funding for these mutual aid groups can be tough. Itiba mentioned some of the funding requirements are more accessible to national or statewide organizations than local ones. These organizations tend to have larger teams and can fulfill funder requirements with much more ease compared to local grassroots organizations. Mutual aid organizations are often funded by local fundraisers or crowdfunded by the collective and they provide direct support without stigmatizing and extensive paperwork or rejection claims.
Kat has faced the funding struggle, too. She said many funders see Florida’s hostile politics as a deterrent to having successful outcomes.
But their organization is filling a crucial need despite the politics of the region. The Neighborhood Fridge recently decided to expand its reach beyond Edgewater to Parramore, a historically Black Neighborhood in the Orlando city limits. Parramore suffers from food apartheid – the intentional and systematic limitation of high-quality food access in areas that have been economically disadvantaged due to a long history of redlining, segregation, and other Jim Crow laws.
“We would fill up the pantry and it would take 2 hours or maybe 3 hours to empty out the whole thing. Now, when we have volunteers dropping stuff off, there are people lining up already to take stuff. Nothing lasts more than 20 minutes,” Kat said.
To increase access and fulfill needs, the Neighborhood Fridge has found a location in Pine Hills and is looking to expand to two community fridges in the schools in the same area for parents and kids.
Language and access barriers pose issues for immigrant communities
Outside of financial support, Seven explained the disregard that politicians and officials have for the Pine Hills area and immigrants as a key barrier to mutual aid work.
“We have such a large immigrant population. There aren’t a lot of institutions to support the population. A lot of us don’t know how to use our power. We are coming from lots of different places and still trying to learn how to exist here,” Seven said.
He further explained how anti-Blackness, lack of language justice, dangerous roads, and lack of access to institutions continue to suppress the power of the Pine Hills community.
“The language access is huge. There are only certain avenues that a lot of our folks can work in and it lowers the ability to be civically engaged,” he said.
Seven shared that there is a large community of Haitians in Pine Hills, but there are very few jobs where there is access to Haitian Creole translation.
“We work with six schools in the Pine Hills area. Maybe one of them right now has a staff member who does Haitian Creole to English translation. We have two libraries within two miles of Pine Hills, and most language access we see is only for Spanish-speaking folks,” he said.
Infrastructure also poses a challenge. Seven explained that Pine Hills neighborhoods are built to be driven through rather than to: “We have very dangerous roads that are built for speed and for people to conveniently come through. But for the people who live here, we suffer unwalkable spaces where people are dying because of very dangerous intersections.”
Las Semillas’ central goal is to build institutions that focus on the health and wellness of Pine Hills residents. They know given these barriers this isn’t an overnight project, but that they must build consistently.
Community-building helps us all thrive
All three of these organizers see mutual aid as a link to bringing the community together.
Kat describes her childhood as a kind of mutual aid network experience. She grew up in the Dominican Republic, where there was a focus on community and sharing resources with one another.
When her family moved to the United States, she quickly realized rampant individualism and the struggle that she and her siblings endured while their mom, who did not speak English, worked three jobs to make ends meet.
She noticed that many people needed help even understanding the concept of a community fridge.
Itibia is grateful to see the increased recognition of the need for mutual aid in Central Florida.
“I think mutual aid is creating relationships with your neighbors, community, colleagues, classmates, and workmates, and developing networks that allow for you to have an extension to family,” they said.
Itibia sees mutual aid as a response to the disparities that are seen in our communities. You don’t have to be involved in a program or organization with hierarchical structures to do it, which allows more people to join in and build community. And it’s important to recognize its ties to Afro-Indigenous people coming together to survive the hardships that they historically faced from systemic oppression, from food apartheid, job discrimination, and to literacy bans.
Seven emphasized the importance of having togetherness, especially as so many of our existing systems and economy are built to drive people apart.
“We don’t have spaces where we can be together, build community together, and build power together. It’s done like that on purpose,” shared Seven. “One of the most insidious things that some of the oppressive forces can do to us is limit our ability to move. That’s why our communities are so segregated.”
Las Semillas has partnered with churches, schools, and local apartment complexes in the Pine Hills area to reduce the gaps in the number of available third spaces, such as the Westside Drum Circles that are hosted outside throughout the year. These community spaces and institutions are used for important events, gathering spaces, and communication systems for the community.
Pine Hills is a place filled with regular people trying to make ends meet, and it is often easy for people in the Greater Orlando community to insult and make rude jokes about the neighborhood.
“It’s very easy to dehumanize people when it is politically expedient to assume marginalized communities are in the situation they are in because of their own issues. There are tons of racist and classist ideals that people have about us,” he said.
Seven mentioned the importance of community and getting to know one’s neighbors. To him, everyone in Pine Hills is his community, and he recognizes the importance of connecting the community on a grander scale internationally since the issues impacting those in his community also affect other communities across the globe.
We hold the power to create change
As we navigate the loneliness and hardship that comes with late stage capitalism, community is more important than ever to organize the world we want to see.
There is so much work done by community networks and collectives who want better for Greater Orlando beyond amusement parks and tourism. Mutual aid groups play an essential role in sustaining the livelihood of many who are exploited by Florida politicians who want to destroy the care economy.
Whether through food justice, affordable housing, or organizing for international issues such as Haiti, Congo, Sudan, or Palestine, I urge you to connect with the local organizations in your area to build resources that you and your neighbors want to see to make life easier. Mutual aid is a model that should be replicated in federal policy for our society and country. No one should go through hurdles to care for their hunger, health, or well-being. We hold the power to create the effective changes we want to see in our communities.