A woman with two children traveled from across town to north Patterson Park to peruse the wooden shelves of the makeshift shelter, leaving with chocolate chips and a jumbo tub of peanut butter.

Another woman dropped off takeout boxes of pattypan squash and chicken. She had cooked too much for dinner.

A man who now lives in Frederick walked by, but didn’t take or leave anything: He was visiting an old neighbor, and wanted to see if the fridge was still around.

Since the first day of 2021, the baby blue mini fridge beneath two shelves of dry goods on Linwood Avenue has been a constant in the park, one of the oldest and best trafficked public fridges in the city. Not much has changed besides a yearly paint job and the food that finds its way to the shelves, which empties and refills multiple times a day.

Other neighborhoods are now reaping the benefits of community fridges, a concept that swept through the country during the pandemic to combat food insecurity along with social distancing requirements. The premise is simple for the four women expanding it throughout Baltimore: Take as you need, give as you can.

Since coming together earlier this year, the Bmore Community Fridge Network has expanded from four community fridges to 15 and counting across Baltimore. It takes a village to get a fridge set up: Someone has to be willing to host the fridge and someone has to be willing to donate one — and transport it. Timing matters, since there isn’t much storage space available in the interim.

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But once it’s there, it’s up to the community to keep it running. People can leave produce, groceries or premade meals. Loyal volunteers communicate through a Facebook group about what they leave and notice when they stop by, coordinating which fridges need food or clean ups.

“It doesn’t have to be elaborate meals. It can be sandwiches,” said Marci Yankelov, one of the network’s founders. “This is something you can do on your own schedule, because the need is 24/7.”

As new locations open across the city, Linwood Avenue remains an example of what works. It’s been a smooth ride since Karien Laurent started it during the pandemic — if you don’t count the time the fridge got stolen, or when bottles of milk exploded after sitting in the boiling July sun. Laurent was inspired by friends in New Orleans who were running fridges, and offered some of her local people pizza to help build her own.

Now, she hardly even notices from her living room window when people stop by. It’s just become part of life. All she really needs is a power outlet and people to help — it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem.

There are a few reasons the Linwood fridge is successful: It’s right near Patterson park, in a mixed-income location that brings in a balance of stockers and seekers, Yankelov said. Laurent takes good care of it, checking on it and giving it a wipe-down as needed, and has a block of neighbors who do the same.

But the key, Laurent said, is non-judgment.

“You don’t have to prove you need something. You might not need anything at all, but it’s a community resource here for you to take whatever’s there and whatever quantity you need to take it in,” she said.

Miguel Lopez, a local fencer, stopped by the Linwood fridge with a coworker last week. His coworker eyed a Kinder Egg while Lopez browsed through the options for something more substantial: canned red beans and rice as well as some sandwich buns.

“Esto me ayuda mucho,” he said, pointing back at the fridge before loading up a small brown bag onto a bike. He recommended another fridge on Greenmount before riding away.

Gloria Lopez, a mother of two little girls in the neighborhood, said her daughters love running down the street to see what’s in the fridge each day.

Lopez shared in Spanish that she was often hungry while growing up in Honduras. Something like this never existed for her. It makes her feel optimistic that her community takes care of each other, she said.

“We have a lot of fun going,” Lopez said in Spanish. “It makes us happy because it’s a moment when we can go and see what’s there.”

As fridges pop up around the city, Laurent encourages more people to start one, or to help out at a fridge near them. At a time when food banks are struggling to meet rising demand and cuts to federal nutrition assistance are underway, public fridges are popping up throughout Baltimore: Two more are coming soon, in Mount Vernon and Harlem Park.

Cook a little extra dinner and throw it in a plastic container, Laurent said.

“We shouldn’t sit around and wait for the government to clean up our streets or feed our neighbors,” she said. “We should just do it ourselves, if we can.”

Banner staff photographer Ulysses Muñoz and reporter Aline Behar Kado contributed to this report.