‘Everything is gone’, the middle-aged woman observes, gilded from her bicycle. On Tuesday she had packed the neighborhood cupboard next to the Dorpskerk in Woubrugge to the rafters with bath salts, shower gel, cotton wool and plasters that she did not need herself.
“The door couldn’t even close anymore,” says the woman, who does not want her name in the newspaper. Anonymity is the cork on which the neighborhood cupboard floats. That is why it hangs out of the barrel, at the back of the Immanuel church building.
Three days later, the bath salts and plasters made way for, among other things, three packs of Lassie 1-minute rice in the brown quinoa variant, a box of rice cakes, a bottle of bleach and a bag of Iconic Christmas tagliatelle left over from the Christmas package. Presumably donated by other inhabitants of the South Holland village, although no one knows who.
Hundreds of such neighborhood cabinets – or share cabinets – are scattered throughout the country. It mainly contains foodstuffs, such as pasta, rice and spreads, but local residents can also share sanitary towels and tampons. The holidays largely determine the content: after Easter many leftover Easter clots end up in the cupboards. Neighborhood refrigerators are now appearing in more and more places, in which people can sell cartons of milk or freshly prepared meals to others who are less fortunate.
Weird choices
With prices rising and taxes rising, more and more people with lower incomes are finding themselves in a bind. Food banks are getting busier, municipalities are concerned about the 1.5 million people who are just not eligible for the government’s one-off energy allowance. The ‘working poor, the low-middle incomes’, alderman Peter Heijkoop van Dordrecht called this group earlier this week. de Volkskrant.
Some can no longer manage on their fixed budget, according to the Poverty Fund, because this is not being adjusted while prices have risen. ‘Then people start looking and sometimes have to make strange choices’, says spokesperson Irene Verspeek. For example, they spend their last cents on bread, and are forced to leave the sanitary towel behind. In such a case, the food bank can offer a solution, although the threshold is sometimes too high to enter, according to Verspeek. Moreover, you should not have too much left each month to be able to use it.
A neighborhood cabinet cannot replace the food bank. “It is also not a free supermarket where you can get your weekly groceries,” says Stefan Honing, the pastor of the Dorpskerk who brought the box to Woubrugge at the end of 2020. “But it can just help people through the week.” He knows, for example, that they make use of a family of Afghan status holders, because the woman had told him that herself while drinking coffee after the church service.
contribute something
‘It’s sharing on the square metre’, says René J. Hoogte about the neighborhood cabinets. De Purmerender – ‘who has worked for a long time in the social domain’ – designed the first example himself in 2016: it had to be a kind of kitchen cupboard with a roof, resistant to wind and weather. The idea of the little free pantry comes from a woman from the US state of Arkansas. She had been charmed by the cabinets in which people share books with each other and was curious if something like this would also work with foodstuffs.
Heights initially wondered whether the neighborhood cabinets would catch on here, just as Honing was unable to estimate how generous Woubrugge would be. There are now a hundred ‘official’ copies hanging in the Netherlands and orders continue to pour in at Hoogte and his foundation SoGoed. If you want, you can also build one yourself. ‘But I think the goal is always the same: to prevent waste, help others and contribute something social in your own environment.’
‘Harrowing’ are the stories that Hoogte hears from people who draw on the neighborhood cupboard he put up in his own front yard six years ago. As far as he is concerned, a neighborhood cupboard is therefore becoming ‘as natural as a defibrillator or a swing’. In order to be able to help more people, the box must be ‘out of the taboo sphere’, he argues.
Rather secret
But that’s not always how it works in practice, says Honing. In Woubrugge, where many of the 3,600 inhabitants know each other, people prefer to keep their troubles a secret. Sometimes after a tip he sits at the table with a fellow villager to offer financial help on behalf of the church. Although he has a duty of secrecy as a preacher, people usually refuse that outstretched hand. “They’re afraid if one person knows, the whole village will know.”
A neighborhood cupboard is ‘more accessible’ in that respect, says Honing. He accepts the risks of misuse. He removes cans of beer himself, so as not to contribute to a possible alcohol addiction, just like products that are very much out of date.
But if someone just takes a pack of pancake mix with them so that they don’t have to go back to the supermarket, so be it. Conversely, he was wrongly excited about the man with the expensive Mercedes who lingered around the box for a very long time. Not to get something out of it, he later found out, but to put something in it.