As an activist, Lily Baran spends a lot of time advocating for laws that will help people get their basic needs met.
But official processes usually take weeks, months or even years to lead to change—if they do at all.
“There are problems we need to fix right now, and government is slow,” Baran said. “If our elected officials aren’t listening to what we need, which we’ve seen over and over, what do we do?”
For Baran and other locals, the answer is to take matters into their own hands. The RN&R met with representatives from four mutual aid groups—volunteer collaborations that provide food, supplies and services directly to people who need them.
Hampton House Garden Project
Lily Baran never knows exactly what’s going to happen at the Hampton House Garden Project on a given day. It’s a grassroots food pantry in the front yard of her house on Elko Avenue, near downtown Reno.
One recent afternoon, a neighbor delivered Turkish bread on a silver platter. Minutes later, a delivery came in from Reno Food Systems, the nonprofit urban farm across town. Then Baran helped a woman who had just been released from the hospital get soup and watermelon from a refrigerator.
Baran is a lifelong activist whose family moved to Reno in the 1980s to help with the Reno Musicians’ Union, of which she is still a member. She opened the food pantry in 2020 and named it after Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Party leader slain by police in 1969. In the front yard, anyone is welcome to get food from the refrigerator or pantry shelves. In the backyard (which is not open to the public), bees buzz; 10 chickens roam; and vegetables and flowers grow in a garden. Every Sunday in the summer, Hampton House hosts a “family dinner,” at which anyone is welcome. Food for the dinner comes from the garden and donations.
“You’d be surprised at the quality of things that come in,” Baran said. Local bakeries like Perenn and Beloved might drop off unsold goods at the end of the day. Volunteers will drop off occasional loads they’ve collected from stores like Winco, Trader Joe’s, Sprouts or the Great Basin Food Co-op. A recent shipment of eggs came from a Burning Man camp.
Baran doesn’t manage or schedule these volunteers or shipments. “It’s just in the spirit of mutual aid—giving what you can, when you can,” she said.
She doesn’t manage the gates, either. She said the food pantry is open 24/7 and that, typically, around 50 to 100 people might stop by in a day to pick up food or other items such as Narcan and fentanyl test strips, or contraception items such as Plan B and condoms, donated by Wild West Access Fund of Nevada.
Baran said that when she first opened the pantry, some people worried that clients would camp in the yard, steal the refrigerator or break into the house.
“Those haven’t been issues,” she said. “When I first moved here, it felt like there were way more police calls on the street and more nefarious activities. And now … you can tell that it’s offered safety to the street, because folks want to respect it. They want to keep it going, and they don’t want to cause any trouble. It’s like an element of public safety. … We’ve had one altercation in five years, and we were still able to solve that without police.”
On the same day the Turkish bread and farm shipment arrived, Baran said: “It’s only 2 p.m. today, and I’ve already interfaced with Heater Bloc Reno, the Northern Nevada Harm Reduction Alliance, and Reno Food Systems. No government was involved, and we solved many problems. We addressed reproductive health, harm reduction, and housing and food insecurity. Imagine if we had something like this every five blocks. What would that look like?”
Hampton House Garden Project is located at 638 Elko Ave., in Reno. For more information, visit @hamptonhousegarden on Instagram.
Laundry to the People
During the COVID-19 shutdowns, Ilya Arbatman and Rosie Zuckerman, co-owners of The Radical Cat bookstore, noticed that the number of people camping under the Wells Avenue Overpass was increasing, so they took it upon themselves to lend a hand.
“We were going down there with a couple of different friends and handing out clothes and stuff, and it seemed like there was a need for laundry services,” said Zuckerman. “We were giving people new stuff, and they were just throwing it away since they had no way to wash things.”
In January 2021, they started Laundry to the People, a free community laundry service for people who are unhoused. Arbatman and Zuckerman would initially borrow a van from the Holland Project each Friday, load people’s clothes into it, and drive to Mr. Bubbles laundromat in Sparks. This method was no longer feasible after the encampment got swept by the police.
“There were probably 200 people under the Wells Overpass until they got kicked out of there,” Zuckerman said. “And then … the cops intentionally scattered everybody.”
The two activists still run the service. It now operates at Champion Laundry Center on Wells Avenue, and people have to get their clothes to the laundromat on their own. Laundry to the People provides soap and pays for the machines.
Arbatman said he is concerned that this arrangement is harder for people with physical disabilities, but providing transport remains infeasible.
The cost to run the washers and dryers is around $60 to $100 per week, Zuckerman said, and the cost of detergent and other supplies varies. Usually, if funds are needed, a plea on Instagram yields some contributions. This year, Laundry to the People received a $2,500 grant from Washoe County, which came from Commissioner Mike Clark’s discretionary funds.
Laundry to the People is not in need of volunteers at the moment. For people who want to help, the organizers are ready to advise on how to start their own laundry aid service.
“We could give them the exact model of how we do it, and they could do it on a different day, in a different location,” Zuckerman said.
Laundry to the People operates every Friday from noon to 1 p.m. at Champion Laundry Center, at 1301 S. Wells Ave., in Reno. To learn more, visit @laundrytothepeople on Instagram.
Family Soup Mutual Aid
Nichole Anagepisis started going to the Believe Plaza in October 2017 to skateboard.
“I was learning how to skateboard at the time, and there was this thing happening every week here called ‘Flatspot Fridays,’ where all the skaters came out and skated this area,” Anagepisis said.
That area got fenced off, which frustrated her. “I talked to a group of people who had been living outside around here for a while, and they expressed that there were less and less places where they could gather and share resources at the time,” she said.
This prompted Anagepisis and a couple of her friends to start showing up at the plaza on Tuesdays and distributing things like hygiene products, food and clothes to people in need. Their group became known as Family Soup Mutual Aid.
“A lot of folks didn’t really trust us, because we were new on the scene, and we didn’t ask for anything in return,” Anagepisis said. “I think there is sort of this quid pro quo relationship when you are giving things like this away, and it took a long time to get past those hurdles and gain trust in the community. But, over time, we’ve established ourselves really well, and this is a really peaceful environment. People come; they bring their kids; they bring their pets. We’ve worked really hard to foster a sense of inclusivity.”
Family Soup sets up every Tuesday at 6 p.m. in the spring and summer, and 5 p.m. in the fall and winter at the Believe Plaza. Now, more than 50 regular volunteers help out, and donations come from groups, individuals and families.
“We have never missed a Tuesday since (we) started—rain, snow or shine,” Anagepisis said.
“If anybody’s interested in helping out, we welcome them to come and join us for a distribution a couple of times, meet the team, see how we organize,” she said. “And if they feel like it’s a good fit for them, and they have bandwidth, they can hop up in our Discord. We have different committees that handle different things like storage, hygiene and food. Honestly, just come and show up. It’s a good way to meet the folks who are coming through the line. The way that we try to organize these are like block parties or potlucks. It’s mutual aid; it’s not charity. This is us spending time with our friends, and giving and receiving at the same time.”
To learn more, follow @familysoupmutualaid on Instagram; join the group’s Substack; or find them on the Discord app. The group accepts drop-offs of items such as hygiene products, underwear and school supplies at Renovate Wallcoverings, at 300 Vassar St., and The Beauty Project Salon, at 720 Tahoe St., Suite A.
Northern Nevada Harm Reduction Alliance
Maddy Larson is a founding board member of the Northern Nevada Harm Reduction Alliance, but she’s not one for formal titles. She prefers “harm reduction homie.”
The group started in 2022, and in 2023, it began to distribute overdose-prevention supplies. In 2024, NNHRA received a grant from the Washoe Opioid Abatement and Recovery Fund—funds from Washoe County, the state of Nevada and other entities as part of a settlement with distributors and manufacturers of opioids—in the amount of $523,403.
NNHRA offers clean use supplies (like syringes, cottons, cookers, tourniquets and sterile water); naloxone (the drug that reverses opioid overdoses, often called by its brand name, Narcan); fentanyl and xylazine test strips; and safer-sex kits. It operates primarily out of Hampton House and on Tuesday nights during Family Soup Mutual Aid gatherings at the Believe Plaza. In addition, the group provides training in overdose response to other organizations.
NNHRA organizers would also like to start a program that purchases and distributes drink test strips so that people can test if their drinks are spiked. Larson called that effort “sort of a threefold thing,” explaining that it will require funding; policies and procedures; and buy-in from bars.
NNHRA is in the process of merging with RISE, the Reno Initiative for Shelter Equality, which began as a grassroots effort to support people who are unhoused and grew into a formalized nonprofit.
Larson said she gets positive reports from people who’ve used her group’s supplies.
“I do get people who come through the Family Soup line who tell me they used Naloxone to reverse an overdose,” she said. “Two weeks ago, I had a woman come through the line and tell me she hasn’t had a soft-tissue infection since we started doing the exchange.”
Harm reduction as a practice “just makes sense,” said NNHRA Outreach Committee chair Steven Markley.
“I had a history of using drugs, but I didn’t understand the philosophy of harm reduction and how that worked,” he said. “A lot of people view it as enabling, but the thing is, people are never going to recover if they’re dead. So that’s what we’re doing here. It’s not that we’re the answer to the whole problem; we’re just a part of the solution.”
If interested in volunteering for the Northern Nevada Harm Reduction Alliance, email nnvhra@gmail.com. Learn more at www.nnvhra.org.