What’s up, everyone? Thank you for your support of Lemonaid this year, whether you’ve donated, helped us with prep or distro, or talked to us at the other events around Athens we’ve been to in 2023. Looking back on the year, we’ve done a lot here at Lemonaid and made some great new connections in our community.

In the first half of 2023, we hosted Tuesday night events most weeks to help support Lemonaid and causes we care about. We put a big focus on the Stop Cop City movement, and organized teach-ins, game nights, and other events to give people an opportunity to come together and learn about what’s happening in Atlanta. When May rolled around, we said goodbye to our previous organizers, Casey and Em, as they moved on to new places and organizing efforts, and used our summer break to reflect and look forward. 

As a mostly student-run group, we’ve had to take summers off from weekly meal distribution, but the new team of organizers was still hard at work taking inventory of what resources Lemonaid has and how we can continue to build community and help our neighbors. The Stop Cop City organizing we’d been involved with in the winter and spring branched off over the summer, as some of our members got involved with starting Athens Against Cop City. We also used this time to start to think about how we can involve non-students in Lemonaid, both as another way of connecting with the Athens community outside of UGA and as a way to have more consistency within Lemonaid from year to year.

In the second half of the year us new organizers have gotten into the rhythm of weekly distro again. We have some new volunteers outside of Athens who have been preparing food for us twice a month, which has given us a bit more flexibility in our budget to fulfill requests we get for supplies like sleeping bags and clothing, especially as the weather gets colder. We’ve been excited to meet several new regulars at our weekly distro, as well as meeting other people who are working to feed our unhoused neighbors.

Looking ahead, we’re excited to of course continue our core goal of weekly food distro and hope to continue to see new faces come and help with prep and distro. We’re also hoping to coordinate with some of the other groups we’ve met so that all of us can maximize our resources. Our next big goal is to start bringing in more Lemonaid-ers to our roughly-monthly recap and planning meetings so that the people who might take on the organizers’ mantle after us can get some experience with what it looks like running Lemonaid, as well as to give anyone who’s donating their time and energy to make this organization work an opportunity to have some input on where we go in the future.

Once again, we’re so grateful to everyone who helps make Lemonaid happen. We want to give a special thank you to Rosanne, Priya, and Ponni, whose monthly contributions to prep have given us more flexibility over the past few months, and to Afterglo and the Treehouse zine, who have made big contributions to us on Open Collective. We hope all of you have a great holiday season, and we look forward to seeing you again in 2024!