Fighting Hunger: Mutual Aid in Tucson

Molly Thrasher of Try Freedom Stories has put
together a video profile of One Can a Week, a
small-scale, neighborhood-based anti-hunger program in Tucson,
Arizona:

For those of you who’d rather read than watch, Thrasher wrote
this description of the effort in a
guest post for Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

“One Can A Week” is a
neighborhood food collection program started in 2009. Peter saw
families in Tucson struggling with poverty and hunger. The local
food bank was not able to meet the demand. Peter asked his
neighbors in his working class neighborhood, if they would donate
just one can of food a week to help the needy. It worked. In the
five years, his neighbors have collected 65,000 pounds of food and
donated over $13,000 to the community food bank.

“One Can a Week” is the very definition of small-scale problem
solving.
Elinor Ostrom argued that many small-scale problems could be
solved by relying on the local knowledge of those in the community.
Peter saw a problem and knew that he could do something simply by
working with his neighbors. This small project has had a huge
impact but the significance of it is much larger. With similar
small efforts in neighborhoods all over America, we could end the
huge problem of hunger in our country.