In Our Hearts

A New World In Our Hearts is a New York City based mutual aid anarchist network made up of autonomous collectives, projects and individuals who share the goal of building a culture of resistance in the City and beyond.

Over the years, we have worked on a wide variety of projects and continue to add more to the list. We have been focused on mutual aid / solidarity, education, and protest activities.

In 2005 we organized and hosted a four-day May Day festival. We helped to run the Brooklyn Free Store (founded in 2001) and operated an infoshop at the same location, until 2005. We also organized the regular Really Really Free Markets which came to NYC in 2004 as a response to the Republican National Convention. Since 2005 we have held Grub twice per month community dinners on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month until the COVID19 pandemic, when we paused that.

Over the years we have also organized demonstrations and marches against war, prisons and police. We have focused a lot of our energy into support for activists who have become targets of the state in what has come to be known as the “Green Scare” through a variety of events.

In 2007 we helped found the 123 Community Space in Brooklyn. The space provided a number of valuable resources to the community. The space operated until 2009, but BedStuy Food Not Bombs which cooked out of the 123 continues to this day. Healthy plant based meals are cooked weekly and shared Sundays in Tompkins (Herbert Von King) Park. For a time we organized a separate Food Not Bombs chapter at Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick too. 

In Our Hearts organizers were part of planning the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement leading up to the September 17 occupation of Zuccotti Park. We helped initiate and operate the kitchen, library, free literature table and other important elements of the protest. 

After the protests were displaced from Zuccotti Park we continued organizing with Occupy Union Square on a nearly daily basis for much of the next year and also with Occupy Town Square. Throughout our history we have published and reprinted hundreds of thousands of copies of zines or pamphlets to help people understand their rights and what anarchists believe. During the occupy movement we printed and distributed more than at any other time.

In October 2012  we helped organize the mutual aid response to hurricane sandy as part of Occupy Sandy who organized tens of thousands of volunteers to help make sure that people in the affected areas had enough food, clothing supplies and hands to help them rebuild.

In Our Hearts believes in abolishing the carceral state and creating alternatives for a safe world. In hopes of bringing us closer to that reality we have offered mediation / conflict resolution assistance for those in need.

As the United States became an increasingly unwelcome place for immigrants we initiated the Solidarity Room Project to help people leave detention and find safe housing. We also worked in support of and with the Refugee Translation Project to help people to transcend borders.

In February 2020 we set up the first 24/7 publicly accessible Community Fridge in NYC. Since then we’ve worked hard to grow this effort to multiple locations throughout the city and beyond. There are now more than 100 community fridges in NYC and hundreds more beyond. We have been working hard to build a network to share resources and support these autonomous efforts. We connect people living in the same geographic area interested in starting their own community fridge, consult with new community groups, and share resources of fridges, excess food, drivers available for pickup in the NYC/NJ area.  Our projects connect people in the city with strong bonds that go beyond the projects themselves. Each community refrigerator becomes a neighborhood hub where people who live on the same block but have never spoken now have a commonality that strengthens relationships, builds trust, and fosters a family atmosphere among diverse neighbors.