By Victoria Hernandez

The crisp autumn air fills with the sounds of a bouncing basketball and the chattering of voices both old and young, human and canine. You would think you had just entered a dog park or a vet office, but the line of people and their pets was to the picnic tables just to the right of the pavilion, not to the local companion clinic.

As the sun starts to set behind the trees, cars roll up and people emerge holding aluminum containers that add the scent of fresh bread and chicken to the air. They hurry down the crunching green grass and line up the picnic tables with salad, paper plates and warm desserts. The volunteers stood ready with smiling faces to serve those who had been patiently waiting.

Monday nights at Walker Park are met with more than just children playing around in the jungle gym. The night is filled with hope and heartache. A lack of a physical home, but the walls of community. Each week from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., the volunteers and co-organizers of MayDay NWA come together to feed the struggling working class of Fayetteville “because everyone deserves food.”

Since 2020, Alex Tripodi, founder and president of MayDay NWA, has cooked and delivered meals for 50 to 100 friends in the homeless community in Fayetteville.

“When the pandemic hit I was furloughed,” Tripodi said. “I was in the fine dining industry and I didn’t know what to do with myself so I started cooking.”

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tripodi would work on cooking and delivering meals to the porches of friends and family. From sharing the opportunity to get home cooked meals on social media, he learned there was a bigger need for accessible food in the community.

“I realized that with a little bit of seed money I could leverage some connections I had in the restaurant industry to get free or close to free food and basically scale this up rather easily and so I did. And found a church to cook out of, Trinity United Methodist Church,” he said. “I’d never met the pastor there before the day I asked him if I could cook out of his church and five to ten minutes into talking to me he gave me a key and said ‘we’re not having service due to the pandemic, God bless.’’

With a bunch of food, and a bunch of volunteers obtained via social media, Mayday Community Kitchen was born. 

“A lot of us were getting stimulus checks,” Tripodi said. “Basically Donald Trump was paying me to run a socialist mutual aid kitchen and feed homeless people. He didn’t know it, but it helped. We were in a church. We were delivering these meals to people’s doorstep. There was very little community interaction… And we realized that we were doing a great job of feeding a lot of people, (but) we were doing a very poor job of building those connections and addressing those vectors of power and privilege.”

The organization shifted into rebranding as MayDay NWA in response to the needs of the evolving community, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

“Myself and my partner were leading those efforts down on Dickson Street with hundreds and hundreds of people [protesting the decision]. MayDay reformed at that time around this model at the park…[to be] something a little more low to the ground, a little more flexible where we could pull up and address another community need if another Roe v. Wade overturn happened,” Tripodi said, “where we could really focus on maybe be smaller in scale in terms of the ambitions when it came to getting the food out, but more deliberate about forming those community connections, about meeting the individuals we were feeding, about learning those needs and potentially addressing those needs or bringing in people to address those needs.”

Serving food at the picnic table, dressed in a striped button up laying over a black graphic tee and teal hair pulled into a top knot, is Rachel Anderson. She began volunteering in September 2020 and says food programs are often designed to keep a barrier between those serving and those receiving, making MayDay NWA’s efforts different from other nonprofits.

“In contrast to that, what we try to do is create a sense of community. So you’ll see, we’ll sit down and eat with people out here. This is our dinner too,” Anderson said. “We’re coming out sharing a meal, trying to build community, trying to build a point of stability for people and be consistent to try and help lift people up.”

Anderson has since become more involved in the organization as both a cook and a volunteer coordinator for MayDay NWA.

“It’s a cause I’m really passionate about and I love cooking. I’m training to become a chef, so it’s a really good intersection of my interests and personal impact I’ve experienced in my life,” she said.

With long dark flowing hair pulled back into a ponytail, a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a tan shirt wrapped by his black belt and blue jeans, another co-organizer and co-worker of Anderson is Machios Talau. He currently works as a sous-chef at Atlas The Restaurant.

“First I was just donating them bread, I was a volunteer, and then I told them that I have a lot of connections in the industry,” he said. “I was like ‘hey let me talk to Elliot and let’s see if we can operate inside Atlas’ kitchen.’”

Atlas The Restaurant is a fine dining establishment serving food inspired by cuisine from around the world. Because it’s closed on Mondays, MayDay NWA is able to utilize their empty kitchen to feed those struggling to buy food.

With Talau’s request, MayDay NWA went from “cooking out of real shit kitchens” to now “operating on a nice scale.”

Like Anderson, Talau has grown to be more of a co-organizer than just another volunteer. Additionally, Talau runs the social media pages for MayDay NWA. 

“I basically brainstorm all the food. All the menu ideas, they rely on me to push. All the food and picking up the food and distributing the food is a responsibility of mine. Basically we’re a team and any responsibilities are on all of us. And some of us have to pick up the slack when others are tired, you know, because we work 50 hours a week, but I’m not here to have a fucking pity party about it,” Talau said. “…I’m like a head chef for this organization. I get up early, I go to St. James (Food Pantry) to pick up the food. I write up a menu. I write up a prep list. I come into Atlas early and I started prepping. And then other volunteers come in, other chefs come in and we execute it and we get here punctually every 6:30 p.m. at Walker Park by the basketball courts.”

For these co-organizers, they all expressed their involvement to be more than just lending a hand.

“Basically it’s just a responsibility. It’s a personal responsibility and it’s a personal philosophy of ‘are you an able body, do you have this connection, do you have this amount of privilege,’ and if you do, how can you share it. And that’s just my mentality, that’s just how I was raised,”​ Talau said. 

Growing up, Anderson says she needed something like MayDay NWA in her community.

“My family didn’t have a lot of money during certain periods of time and there were definitely times where the only meals I was eating were the free breakfast and lunch I got at school,” she said. “Hunger is a cause…I have experienced that and I know how stressful and how isolating and just how painful that really is. So trying to address that need within the community that I live in feels really important to me and kind of healing work for myself.”

Through the organization, both the community and the nonprofit are feeling fuller with food and connection.

“It creates a sense of agency for me. I can’t change things on a big picture, but if I get some like minds together and really focus my scope and scale, we can do something,” Tripodi says. “It’s become my community, it’s become my circle, it’s become something I’m known for. It’s allowed me to fall in love. A lot of my best friends are homeless now. It’s created my circle of friends. It’s really filled up the Maslowian scale of values for me in my life.”