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This is one of a pair of stories exploring efforts to make donated food healthier, more delicious and more dignified. You can read the other story here.

Dion Dawson’s day starts around 8 am at the corner of 59th Street and Racine Avenue in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Most days, his six-year-old son Bryson accompanies him, eager to help stock the community fridge labeled with “FREE FOOD” in sky blue letters. Usually, the area’s residents have already gathered around the fridge, which has been spray-painted with happy cows, bright red apples, yellow corn and potatoes, as Dawson puts in oranges, lettuce and strawberries. He hands out bananas and grapes, too.

“Always grapes,” he emphasized. “When I grew up food insecure, I never got to eat fresh grapes, ever. So I make sure we always have fresh grapes. That may not be cost effective, but it makes a difference.”

Dawson sets up the Chicago nonprofit Dion’s Chicago Dream and the community fridge in 2020. He added a free weekly produce home delivery service in 2021. Both address the lack of access to fresh fruit and vegetables endemic to food deserts — areas that lack supermarkets and are typically low-income. They are also inspired by Dawson’s past food insecurity as well as his negative experiences with donation boxes from food banks.

“More than 500,000 Chicago residents live in a food desert,” Dawson says, citing American Community Survey data. “More than half of our residents will be food insecure in our community within this year.”

The Englewood fridge is accessible all day, unmanned, for anyone to take as much fresh produce as they like. “The opportunity to consume fresh fruits and vegetables is not something that I am used to,” said one resident, Terence. “I feel sometimes that I don’t deserve it because no one has cared to offer it to us consistently.”

Dawson spent six years in the Navy and experienced 14 years of homelessness before and after his service. “I grew up with three brothers and a single mom who struggled with addiction,” he says via Zoom from his mother’s house in Englewood. His mother recently survived kidney cancer, and he made her the executive assistant of his nonprofit. “We often went hungry or lived three days on potato chips,” Dawson remembers.

What stuck with him most, though, wasn’t just the hunger but the dehumanization he felt at the food banks. “I’ll never forget that horrible soaking wet day when my family had to wait outside for hours as the rain poured down on us, only to be rewarded with expiring fruits, unlabeled canned goods and a box of raisins.” Maybe worse than the food was the shame he associated with the experience. “Nobody looks you in the eye. Nobody connects with you. You are given a box of discarded food, most of it food you wouldn’t normally eat, and it is such a humiliating experience.”

This is the reason he decided to do everything differently with Dion’s Chicago Dreams. “We focus on the recipient instead of the donor’s experience. We connect with people.”

His project was launched as a spontaneous idea when a friend challenged him in 2020 with: “What are you going to do for Juneteenth?” Dawson responded on a whim, “I’m going to feed 100 families.” He raised $2,500 on GoFundMe, bought 100 pounds of food and fed 96 families. “After that, I said, let’s go for it, and I started Dion’s Chicago Dream.” He taught himself how to set up a nonprofit, and in September 2020, he began stocking the community fridge in Englewood, working out of his car.

“Since its inception, Project Dream Fridge has provided more than 36,000 pounds of fresh food and water,” Dawson says, at a weekly cost of $550. Through the weekly home deliveries, he and his seven employees now deliver to 375 homes per week, feeding 2,000 people in 23 neighborhoods with 15,000 pounds of fresh produce per month. “We move more produce than Walmart,” he quips, at a cost of about $1,000 per family per year. “We have that tangible impact.”

Supported by donations from locals like rapper G Herbo and organizations such as the Obama Foundation, what he delivers is exclusively fresh produce. Bananas, cucumbers, spinach, mango, whatever is in season and available from its wholesale supplier, JAB Produce. “The food is wow!” 65-year-old Alice Lesure says while she is preparing collard greens and cabbage from the most recent delivery for lunch. She has known Dion Dawson for “20-plus years” because her son went to school with Dawson, and she reached out to the nonprofit through her son. “I’m on disability. I eat healthier now and don’t have to worry about buying fresh