Get involved: community table builds!
About four years ago I picked up the red table below from a local buy nothing group and set it out on my parking strip to use as a free community pantry table. It small and ugly but it got the job done. A few months later I realized it was far too small, so I made a table top out of the porch railing spindles I had just demo’d from my porch renovation and set that on top of the red table to expand the table’s surface area. After that I built out the rest of the table- put a roof on it to protect it from the rain, added better legs that leveled out the table since the area where it sat was on a slope— and eventually I added the cabinet to protect produce and items that our local crow and squirrel friends were helping themselves to.
This little community table has seen dozens of people dropping off food donations, and the turnover of food and goods is constant. To me, this indicates that she’s filling a need in the community and hopefully providing at least some small amount of relief to unhoused and under-served folks in the area.
We love being able to host this micro-hub for our neighborhood, and I think it’s important to create as many hubs like this— big, small, micro, mega— that can support people and meet them where they are. So with that being said, Dan and I want to start offering to build these tables for local Tacoma folks who would be able to put one in a publically accessible spot and manage it (this sometimes involves removing things that get donates which aren’t shelf stable like dairy or meat, cleaning up any trash that gets left, removing produce that has started going bad, etc). Ours is in the parking strip in front of our house, but yours could be in your front yard, or in your alley, wherever you think would be visible and accessible to those in need.
These would be free for you, all the building materials and labor will be on us or covered by donations, and we’re thinking we’d be able to build one per month depending on bandwidth. It will look slightly different from mine because mine was made way too deep (no one can even reach the back half), and the windows were salvaged, so it will likely be the same overall but a shallower version without windows.
Dan and I are taking submissions for folks who are interested, so if you want to be on the list, submit your info below and we’ll try to work our way through the list as best we can!
When we build the first one we’ll also be creating a tutorial and building plans so that you can build your own, so if you’re not local to Tacoma, or you are and you’re Handy AF, you’ll have those plans to make the process quick and easy! Once we get that tutorial created I’ll link it here!
