Anna Grant-Bolton

Evanston, IL

Outreach Lead & Steering Committee Organizer, Evanston Community Fridges

Bridging food distribution gaps in and around Chicago through mutual aid, grassroots community education, and policy advocacy.

Anna Grant-Bolton is the Outreach Lead and Steering Committee Organizer at Evanston Community Fridges (ECF), a grassroots organization bridging gaps in food distribution through 24-hour accessible community fridges and pantries. Guided by an ethos of care and neighborly responsibility, their participatory model shifts the focus from short-term charity to creating mutual aid networks that draw from pre-existing community resources. Since co-founding the initiative with a small team in 2021, Anna's leadership has helped scale ECF to four regional fridge locations across Evanston and Skokie, managing a $50,000 annual budget, mobilizing over 150 active volunteers, and establishing grocery redistribution partnerships with over a dozen local restaurants and municipal agencies. Through the Scholars program, Anna aims to develop a two-pronged action plan: a community education program to build grassroots capacity and an advocacy team to address the root causes of food injustice in Evanston and broader Chicagoland. Anna is eager to sharpen her strategic storytelling and systems-thinking capacities to translate community-led resource mobilization into durable municipal public policies.