The Little Free Failure of Capitalism; or, Distributing Socks to Your Neighbors for Fun and Nonprofit

So, what’s this exactly?

The Little Free Failure of Capitalism (LFFC to its friends, pronounced LIFF-see) is, depending on our mood when you ask:

• A self-service kiosk handing out necessities other than food to the houseless and indigent communities of south Seattle;
• Our most emotionally-devastating side project;
• An agalmic, syncretic support kiosk–we hand out things that are expensive in small quantities, but nearly free in bulk, and add anything to the project that we can sustain and which will help;
• One of our personal instantiations of doing more than nothing in response to the horrors.

In short, it’s an aid station handing out non-food that also distributes zines and art.

As of September 2026, we hand out:

• Clothing (socks and disposable ponchos)
• Safer sex: condoms, internal (“female”) condoms, and lube
• Narcan (naloxone) in both nasal and injectable formats
• Wound care: nitrile gloves, ABD pads, non-adherent pads, Vaseline, CoBan, Band-Aids
• Sanitation: soap, body wash, toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, hand sanitizer
• Period products: tampons plus five sizes of maxi pads
• Masks (KF94 and N95, individually wrapped)
• Miscellaneous: Sunscreen, earplugs, pencils, ibuprofen, paper bags
• Winter only: warm hats, warm gloves, disposable handwarmers

We also distribute zines (including this zine!), art, native plant seeds (seasonally), and brochures from Crisis Connections [1]Crisis Connections that connect people to shelters, food support, houselessness support services (like showers, phones, computers), and medical assistance. We provide a free landline phone (and a place to stand while using it), and WiFi. We used to do charging (we’ll get to that in the Build section). We often hand out stickers.

We believe strongly that there should be no barriers to accessing assistance: none, zero, zip, nada. You don’t need to talk to anyone to use LFFC, you don’t need to prove you’re worthy or that you “really need it,” you don’t need to be sober (in general or even while swinging by, though we do extremely strongly discourage the use of drugs at LFFC; again, look for the discussion on charging in Build), and you don’t need to say your prayers. You don’t need to be houseless or indigent, either; kids stop by on their way to or from school to grab period supplies they forgot, housed families stop by to grab this week’s zines, and people from all walks of life come get free Narcan because, unlike (some) pharmacists, we don’t judge you for wanting it, regardless of why.

Seattle should have zero of these, because everyone should be housed, clothed, warm, fed, and able to partake in the comfort of friends if they so choose. (As a visitor put it on a comment card: “This is a balm to the soul, and a knife to the heart.”) But until that day, Seattle needs many, many more of these kiosks.

If you like video content, some of the ideas below (though not the same words) are covered in an Ignite Seattle [1]Ignite Seattle talk on LFFC [2]talk on LFFC one of us did in March 2026. It’s an Ignite talk, so it’s five minutes long and has twenty pictures.

Why should someone do this?

In the US, there are two major political parties. One is composed of (at best) centrist cowards. The other is speedrunning a grifty redux of the rise of Hitler circa 1935, but with much worse fashion sense. (Seriously, JD Vance always looks so rumpled you’d think he had just finished molesting a sofa, and let’s not talk about the too-big-shoes issue in the Cabinet.) As a compromise between the two parties, then, the extremely limited safety net that the government bothers to provide is:

• facially, obviously, and profoundly insufficient for the need;
• focused on ensuring that people barely survive (see this fascinating explanation of how the US poverty line systematically ensures poverty and fragility in the working class [3]this fascinating explanation of how the US poverty line systematically ensures poverty and fragility in the working class for a whole discussion; you’ll need to scroll down to the section called “How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America”);
• gated extremely heavily to ensure that the same bad actors who invented the racist lie of the “welfare queen” [4]racist lie of the “welfare queen” can’t find people (after the fact) to point to and say “this person didn’t deserve help;” and
• restricted to people who have photo ID and birth records quickly available to prove their citizenship, because, after all, people living on the street and fighting just to survive each new day always have well-organized records!

As a result, even for people who are served by this “safety net,” there are a lot of needs that go unmet, and by design a lot of people are left in the cold.

Why did we do do this?

Because we couldn’t fucking stand it anymore, that’s why.

If you’re paying attention in 2026, inside of you there are two reasonable, yet opposed, options competing for your heart (at least; you may have more!):

1. OH MY FUCKING GOD i have got to do something THIS IS ALL TERRIBLE how do i possibly help FIRE EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE
2. Making “big gesture” attempts at public charity is unsustainable, because once the initial excitement wears off, you won’t be able to keep up the effort, you’ll burn out, and in a few months we’ll be back to the status quo ante but with one more person saying the problem is “too big to solve.” So don’t.

The second idea is rational, well-considered (and often articulated by people much smarter than we are, as well as more versed in leftist theory), and so we listened to it, told it we would keep it in mind, and then put a pillow over its face.

We instead took some inspiration from the following quote:

May I set the stage? I shall impersonate a man; come, enter into my imagination and see him. His name: Alonso Quijana, a country squire, no longer young, bony, hollow-faced, eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. Being retired, he has much time for books. He studies them from morn to night, and often through the night as well–and all he reads oppresses him, fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways towards man. He broods, he broods, and he broods, and finally, from so much brooding, his brains dry up. He lays down the melancholy burden of sanity, and conceives the strangest project ever imagined: to become a knight-errant, and sally forth into the world to right all wrongs! No longer shall he be plain Alonso Quijana, but a dauntless knight known as Don Quixote de La Mancha!

Man of La Mancha (Wasserman, Leigh, Darion, 1965).

Whether that’s helpful or not is up to you. (We like it!)

Finally (and as related in the Ignite talk linked above): Sesame Street states plainly that all the people we see on the street, in need, every day, are our neighbors:

Neighbors are the people that you meet
when you’re walking down the street
they’re the people that you greet each day.

Accordingly, when we see people with tranq wounds (do a web search for “xylazine wounds”) forced to wear dirty bandages because they can’t get clean ones, these are our neighbors, and it’s the basic obligation of fucking civilization to help our neighbors.

Seriously, though, doesn’t this need a systemic solution?

Yes. Houselessness is a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution. (It’s a symptom of the systemic underlying problem of billionaires existing, which creates the conditions where many starve so that a few people can have more money than has ever existed in history.) In short, however, we aren’t getting a systemic solution anytime soon; our elected leaders have decided that people living is too hard and boring to deal with. Accordingly, while we can and should work toward a systemic solution, in the meantime, every person we help with stopgap solutions is a person who gets to live and not die pointlessly of trench foot in Seattle in February and that seems good, actually.

What about donating to larger organizations in this space?

The large organizations have space, buying power (and loading docks!), and subject-area expertise; we are not going to tell you they’re inherently bad. The issue is that they’re constrained in what they can do by their funders–in particular, funding organizations require that they collect data to show “impact,” which inherently means that they’re going to have substantial barriers to people getting help, like filling out forms, proving indigence, and the like. Again, as we say above, that leaves people behind. We don’t do that. Both are needed; the scale of the problems in front of us don’t leave space for zero-sum pretensions.

Why should you do this?

Because you can, and because people in a civilization have a moral duty to ensure that others aren’t left to die for no reason.

People experiencing houselessness spend most of their time dealing with that fact–trying to scrape together fees for nightly shelters, begging for food, etc.–and end up in problematic, and sometimes dire, situations for a lack of pretty basic supplies. People end up with sepsis because they couldn’t get enough period supplies, get dysentery in the largest cities in the US because they couldn’t find a place to wash their hands, or lose feet to literal trench foot because they couldn’t get dry socks. (Yes, like in the Napoleonic wars. Look on Wikipedia for “immersion foot syndromes.”)

We can sit around and look and hope and wait for the “right thing” that fixes everything, but it’s been a while and nobody has yet invented a Star Trek utopia, so we’re not hopeful one’s coming on Monday. If you work in tech, you absolutely have the income to support this; we’re a tech worker and a nonprofit worker, with a kid and a full-time nanny, and we can still make this happen. If you don’t, you can do the same thing, either with your neighbors or simply at a smaller scale (e.g., just do socks); every bit of direct aid helps someone.

So start doing this, and if the utopia shows up we can all stop. Reach out to us (info@lffc.usinfo@lffc.us), and tell us what worked and what didn’t for you, and let’s build the world we want to live in, rather than the “effectively altruist” cruelty we inhabit today. We have a duty to our neighbors, and we are tired of pretending otherwise.

Do it for Big Bird.

Siting and Permits

“It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.” - attributed to RADM Grace Hopper

“Only three things can really fuck up your day: three-phase power, the fire marshal, or the building inspector.” - local hackerspace leader

Candidly, the trick for siting is to avoid needing a permit. In Seattle, the way to do this is to comply with the permit exception [1]permit exception for “Little Free Libraries.” (Read it yourself, but the simple explanation is that it needs a slight setback from the sidewalk, into your property.) A lot of cities will have something similar. If you have an HOA [2]HOA, you may be screwed for doing this at your home–so go find someone else’s space to host it, and you can stock it!

Why is this so critical? Before starting LFFC, we took a lot of walks around various neighborhoods, particularly the Beacon Hill [3]Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle. On a given walk, we might encounter a lovely and fun idea: a short story printer! A seed library! A sock exchange! And the next time we passed through the same street, without fail, they would be gone. What kept happening is that in Seattle, we have planting strips (dirt between sidewalks and the curb), and that’s the obvious place to put a Little Free Library or similar. It’s also a code violation; there’s no way to get a permit to build in that location. It thus takes precisely one phone call from one jerk neighbor to remove such a thing.

So LFFC falls into an existing permit exception and is on land we own. It therefore isn’t subject to a base permit challenge; taking it down using lawfare would require a more complex type of attack (e.g., claiming it to be a public nuisance)–and since in our immediate circle of friends, we count an accountant, several lawyers, some professional contractors (none who worked on LFFC, but they can wave a hammer convincingly), and many other useful sorts, “we’d like to see them try.” (Should you build a LFFC in Washington and encounter legal challenges, drop us an email (again, info@lffc.usinfo@lffc.us); we can’t necessarily help (though maybe we can), but we definitely want to know and to add your experience to a new version of this zine.)

Construction

How to construct a LFFC-like object will depend a lot on siting, so we don’t have any hard or fast rules here, just some notes. Photos of LFFC’s current incarnation are visible at https://lffc.us/abouthttps://lffc.us/about if you want to see (they don’t look good printed in black and white).

• It’s a big box - LFFC in its current incarnation is about 52 inches wide by 48 inches tall. We use about half that height for things we’re handing out (in stacking drawers), and the rest of the height is for art, zines, brochures, posters, etc. The inside of the box is around nine inches deep; our bins are 7.5 inches deep, and you do want to leave some extra (at least half an inch, but an inch is better) so that your drawers can sit back on the shelves.
• It needs doors - They keep rain off, but they also keep stuff inside; on windy days, light stuff blowing around can be very annoying. (Our main supplies are in drawers, but zines and stickers and the like can blow away.) We think transparent doors, so that the contents are obvious, help a lot with attracting attention for all the contents (both zines and supplies); on the current incarnation of LFFC, we use two old reclaimed windows we put hinges on. It’s possible you might find that transparency isn’t needed!
• MDF and particleboard will hurt you - for the initial LFFC build, we used two reclaimed guitar display cases as the primary cabinets. They looked wonderful and functioned great! For about… four months. Then the mold set in, because underneath their sufficiently-elegant veneers, they were just particleboard, and there’s really no way to make that weatherproof. From January through May 2025, we fought a rearguard action against black mold in the cases (bleach isn’t enough), and we completely rebuilt LFFC in August 2025, just shy of the one-year anniversary. Our new build (reclaimed cedar boards, painted with standard outdoor paint) has been lovely since.
• The roof should protect guests - In the initial design, we built a roof kind of like those on Little Free Libraries: it protected the kiosk. What we didn’t think through until midwinter was that people spend several minutes looking at LFFC to browse and find things they’d like to have, and our roof was actively hurting that; the edge was pretty well-placed to dump water down the backs of visitors (this was also due to a gutter failure, to be fair, but it was wet). In the above-mentioned rebuild, we put on a substantially larger roof, and even attached a standard gutter.
• Think about lighting early - In Seattle, it gets dark before 6pm for half the year, so most visitors will come after dark–but even in more southerly climes, you’ll want light for two purposes: to attract visitors, and to aid in item selection. Think about how you’re going to add lights (including wiring!) as part of your design process.
• Foot it in concrete - If you use support posts (e.g., it’s not a box sitting on a retaining wall or similar platform), they should be footed in concrete, as it adds a lot of stability. You’ll want to pour the concrete in form tubes [4]form tubes to ensure it has the right size and depth; there are calculators online that, given a post size and a height above ground, will output a tube diameter and length (including depth below ground). You don’t need to get a concrete mixer; you just need to search the web for quick set concrete fence posts [5]quick set concrete fence posts and then do what it says. It works, it’s reliable, and you can do it with no previous experience (we did!), as long as you’re generally able to do household DIY projects at a “use a shovel and don’t injure yourself” level.

Optional Add-ons

We have a few things beyond the primary “distribute things people need” mission that we do at LFFC. All of these are exceptionally optional; there’s no need to build these in at the start, but you might consider leaving some space in your design for future fun ideas.

Phone

We’ve had a landline phone since day one. Why do folks need a landline phone in the age of cell phones? First, they may not have a phone at all; while the Lifeline [6]Lifeline phone program started under Obama expanded cell phone access, the first Trump administration choked it almost to death, and the second one has, naturally, not fixed the situation. Second, even if people have a Lifeline phone, such phones are relatively frequently stolen, have low allotments of minutes, and may simply not have charge (see Charging, below). Finally, for people in abusive relationships, a cell phone can be a tool of control, where the abuser can check that the victim doesn’t contact “prohibited” people or groups. For all these reasons, a landline phone can be a very useful resource.

Service is provided by Futel [7]Futel, a Portland-based, vaguely-Situationist [8]Situationist collective who both sets up street phones (23 as of September 2026, including three in Seattle) and does interactive audio art on them, as well as providing voicemail and operator services. They’re awesome. To add their service to your location, you can reach out to them at their site. If you’re in Seattle, though, read the WiFi section below.

At first, there was some, though not very much, usage of the phone–just a few calls per month. Later, we added brochures from Crisis Connections [9]Crisis Connections, which collate food resources (both hot meals and food banks), medical resources, support services, and shelters with hours, gating requirements, and contact information. Usage shot up, and has remained consistent since (between a call every two days and three calls a day on average, depending on the month). Crisis Connections is only for King County, WA, but some kind of similar compilation of resources might exist in your area.

WiFi

We got a request to add WiFi in April 2025, and brought it online in August. The difficult thing about WiFi isn’t providing an Internet uplink, it’s providing one that doesn’t cause difficulty for the site host; if a visitor downloads copyrighted material, the host’s ISP will harass the host, not the visitor, and possibly shut off their Internet access permanently. Thankfully, we have a solution; our friends at ShadyTel [10]ShadyTel, long-time participants in the PNW hacker scene, provide the uplink via a tunnel. This means that guests appear, to the Internet, to be coming from ShadyTel, not from a site host. (As an ISP, ShadyTel can handle copyright claims differently from home Internet users; we also use several technical means to discourage the kinds of Internet usage that tend to annoy the Associations of America.)

LFFC was the first site host for this approach, but we realized that since the phone and WiFi both need power and an Internet connection (and nothing else), this was a repeatable solution; hence, we launched the Connections [11]Connections subproject, which adds combined landline phone + WiFi service (along with the brochures mentioned above) to sites around Seattle. So far, our first two locations beyond LFFC are at a Seattle Community Fridge [12]Seattle Community Fridge site and a nearby coffee shop, but we’d be delighted to expand anywhere a street phone and WiFi would be useful. If that’s you (even if you’re not doing a larger aid project like LFFC!), please do reach out; there are more details and a video at the Connections site. (Again, info@lffc.usinfo@lffc.us.)

Charging - the Ecstasy and Agony

Charging is very useful to visitors, as it can be difficult to find power, particularly accompanied by a safe space to wait. We’ve iterated on charging quite a bit:

• Originally (September 2024), we wanted to let people charge devices without having to stand at LFFC, so we provided “borrow and return” USB batteries. They were borrowed! They were not returned [13]not returned. This happens.
• We then (installed a multiport charger with cables, attached to LFFC. It was very popular for a few weeks, and was then stolen.
• We then (call it February or March 2005) installed another of the same charger, with substantially more reinforcement. It lasted a few months, and was then stolen by someone with no regard for LFFC; they not only took the charger, but destroyed much of the lighting as well (a rare instance of real damage to LFFC). We waited some time after that setback to come up with a new plan as part of the site rebuild in August 2025.
• With the rebuild, we installed a power strip with small USB chargers, completely contained within a locked, waterproof enclosure (screwed to the 4" beams of LFFC); cables exited the box via waterproof cable glands. This wasn’t ideal; the small chargers sometimes came unplugged of their own accord, and not exposing any open USB ports meant that people with USB-chargeable devices that need special cables were out of luck. Nonetheless, it worked pretty well for perhaps six months, but eventually people started destroying the waterproof glands out of… boredom? Desire to own very short USB cables? Unclear. But then someone lit the box on fire to be able to destroy the plastic hasp and bypass the padlock (presumably to steal the chargers, which they were not successful at) ending this iteration.
• We then [14]then rebuilt the whole shebang into a metal outdoor electrical box with an integrated lock. This solved the tampering problems, and generally we had much better charger reliability once the chargers couldn’t be intentionally damaged. This… turned out to cause a worse problem.

This final rebuild came online in late May, 2026. A couple of weeks later, we started noticing significantly increased rates of site damage and trash. We also had multiple incidents of people violating the only two rules we really have for visitors to LFFC, which were previously nearly-never violated:

1. Do not use drugs in our driveway.
2. Do not obviously commit crimes in our driveway.

Oftentimes, the people violating these rules would complain of racism when being evicted. Two examples:

• No, sir, it’s not that you’re Black, it’s that I have been watching you smoke meth for the last five minutes. Yes, sir, I am calling you a liar when you say you aren’t doing drugs, because you are making that statement while holding, in one hand, a meth pipe, and, in the other hand, a lighter. You are not as sneaky as you think you are. Well, sir, I’m not a medical expert, but I would guess that this may be a side effect of the aforementioned meth.
• No, person who has unloaded an entire wagonload of stolen goods onto my driveway and appears to be using the driveway to organize your collection, it’s not racism that makes me think your statement that “you bought all this stuff” is untrue. It’s that the four identical pairs of women’s leather shoes you have are not in your size, and most genuine luxury goods distributors do not use random folks’ driveways for logistics. Also a lot of this is quite clearly stolen copper.

By early July [15]By early July, we had six incidents of major vandalism in a five-day period; this is notable, as in the previous twenty months, we’d had only two total. So we removed the charging apparatus entirely, and the problems ended instantly. The explanation, as best we’ve been able to surmise, is that (a few) people waiting for charging become bored and then destructive–and other folks see a place where houseless folks aren’t “moved along” and feel entitled.

Candidly: this result sucks. We have worked to provide charging for nearly the whole two years, helped a lot of folks along the way, and ultimately, we’ve failed. We hate taking away a resource upon which many good people relied. We hate having to punish the many to deter the few. We decided that the harms to LFFC, and to the neighborhood, had become egregious enough that the project would have to end if we couldn’t stop them, and this is how we were able to end them. This isn’t a “final” decision–we would still like to provide something to help people charge mobile devices (and the occasional powered wheelchair)–but we aren’t sure how to proceed. (If you have suggestions, send them to info@lffc.usinfo@lffc.us; we’re happy to discuss!)

Zines and Art

Zines and art have always been part of what we wanted to do at LFFC. Adding things in these categories has been very bursty, but we’ve been delighted by how many community members leave art to distribute (from big pieces to tiny origami and such). We print most of the zines that go out (either works from Fenestrate Press, or from other zinemakers that are free to distribute), but at least one locally-created periodical now has LFFC on their site list. There are so many fun things to do here, and we have more planned!

What We Give Out

Any aid site is going to have a finite amount of capacity, which we’ll define as the amount of goods that can be given away per month. Capacity can be constrained by funds available, by storage for backstock (stuff that’s not currently being handed out), or by storage in the aid cabinets. Handing out a bunch of different products, however, complicates things; how many toothbrushes do you need per condom you hand out, for instance?

We suggest thinking of capacity in terms of pairs of socks per day. Socks are critical for the unhoused population, and of all the things we give away, socks are the one that goes first, every day; if there are still socks left in the bins when we do a daily restock, we can tell immediately that not many people visited. (If that happens too frequently, it’s a sign that you need to increase advertising to get the word out more effectively!)

At LFFC, we give away ten pairs of socks per day. This isn’t a magic number, it’s simply the result of our bin sizes and our sock sizes. Accordingly, when you look at the numbers in the tables below, you can scale them up or down based on socks per day.

The quantity next to each item below is how many we stock at once. (As said elsewhere: this doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing! You may have cost constraints, space constraints, or other issues. If all you can put out is 10 pairs of socks a day, do that.) Some items (e.g., socks) are taken in full every single day; many are not, but there are many reasons not to put more than some number out at once. (Especially in the startup phase, we found that people, naturally assuming that since we were new, we wouldn’t be around long, would take everything available assuming there wouldn’t be more; as we have become more of a neighborhood institution, people take what they need for a day or two, and leave the remainder for others, knowing more will be there.)

The List

• Clothing
  • Socks (10 pairs) - We started with athletic socks, but soon moved to thermal socks; we were fortunate enough to find a supplier that had a wool-blend thermal sock that was affordably priced, and in quantity, the cost was actually well below bulk “athletic” socks on most sites. That supply dried up after about eighteen months, but thermal/wool socks are still our goal. We’ve always done crew length; we’ve heard on the grapevine that many sources of socks donate ankle-length socks which are common, but they’re strongly disliked by the client community (too many opportunities for chafing). We’ve always done one size (men’s 10-13), simply because our volume isn’t sufficient to enable stocking multiple sizes (if we did that, we’d be buying socks in lower quantity which would then increase our cost); that said, we have had occasional requests to stock smaller socks, so there’s some unmet need here.
  • Disposable Ponchos (5 ponchos) - Get the thickest ones you can find, because the thinner ones tear substantially more easily than plastic food wrap. We would characterize our current ones as “okay but not great,” but we haven’t found any great ones that are cost-effective; the next level up from these are non-disposable nylon often distributed with a sports team logo, and that isn’t affordable at our scale.
• Safer Sex - We added these supplies at the suggestion of the state agency distributing naloxone. “Can’t people get condoms everywhere?” To some extent, yes, they can, but at the same time, not as “everywhere” as one might think. Usage shoots way up when school is out for summer (we see lots of high schoolers coming just for these supplies), but generally these supplies are in demand year-round. We get all of these from the government (in Seattle, from King County Public Health [1]King County Public Health (KCPH)), because lube packets are expensive in sub-pallet quantities, and while bulk condoms are cheap, getting a mix of brands (particularly, including latex-free condoms) is difficult, and that’s something KCPH does for us.
  • External (Male) Condoms (50 condoms) - as noted above, a mix of brands (KCPH uses the phrase “find your fit!”) including non-latex.
  • Internal (Female) Condoms (2 condoms) - there’s only one brand on the market, and they’re substantially more expensive per unit than external condoms, but they’re useful for anyone who has sex with men.
  • Lube (25 packets) - KCPH will provide silicone-based or water-based lube; we hand out only water-based lube.
• Naloxone (2 boxes spray, 2 packs injectable) - Absolutely table stakes, but absolutely unaffordable at retail prices; the cost to source this much naloxone at retail price would equal the cost of everything else, combined. We’re extremely thankful that our state and county provide it to us. Package warnings and general recommendations are to keep it at “room temperature;” however, peer-reviewed studies (e.g., this one from 2019 [2]this one from 2019) show that naloxone remains safe and effective even after freezing or boiling it. That said, until it goes into LFFC, we do actually store it inside as recommended by King County Public Health / OEND [3]OEND.
• Wound Care - in Seattle, the illicit drug supply is heavily adulterated with xylazine (tranq). Tranq causes giant abscessed wounds all over the body (not just at injection sites), so there are lots of people who are dealing with pretty gnarly wounds. The Everywhere Project [4]The Everywhere Project has excellent resources on tranq and wound care, if you want to learn more about how to use the below items to take care of xylazine wounds.
  • ABD (Combine) Pads (5 pads) and Non-Adherent Pads (5 pads) - Combine pads have absorbent gauze and a waterproof backing so that fluids can’t leak through the pad; they’re like giant, non-adhesive Band-Aids. We added the non-adherent pads (which, as their name suggests, don’t get stuck to wounds by clotting blood or drying fluids) at the suggestion of street medics who visited LFFC one day; they recommend a non-adherent pad directly over the wound, and then a combine pad over that to keep things from leaking through into clothing. We use the 5x9 size in both items, which you’ll understand if you did a web image search for “xylazine wounds” earlier.
  • CoBan (3 rolls) - These are the COherent BANdages you might be familiar with from donating blood; they’re sometimes called vet wrap. They’re stretchy and rubbery and only stick to themselves. If you’ve donated blood, you’ll often get a 1" wide strip of CoBan to hold down a cotton ball on your arm. We hand out 3" wide rolls because they’re the most useful for holding on the non-adherent + combine pad stacks.
  • Band-Aids (60 bandages) - Originally we handed these out loose, but that wasn’t very helpful. After a brief time making packs of Band-Aids using small envelopes, we now buy them in 20-pack baggies and hand those out. (10-pack would also be fine, you just want to hand them out in some kind of pack, but making packs yourself is time-consuming and fiddly.)
  • Vaseline (10 packets) - used to keep wounds moist, to promote healing. We noticed, after adding lube packets (alongside condoms), that we were distributing lube packets in great numbers on days when a lot of gauze also got taken, and out of proportion to the condoms taken. A street medic mentioned the need to keep wounds moist, and that Vaseline was a good option when available, so we started distributing Vaseline; lube usage went down and the Vaseline has been frequently used ever since.
  • Gloves (Nitrile) (24 gloves) - At the suggestion of a friend who has worked with harm reduction efforts, we’ve always distributed these in groups of three, with two gloves stuffed into a third. This keeps two very clean. We hand out only the XL size, because smaller hands and larger hands can both fit. We only distribute nitrile gloves to avoid hurting visitors who have latex allergies; that said, note that nitrile gloves are about twice as expensive as latex gloves, so this is a choice one could reasonably make differently.
• Sanitation
  • Soap (10 bars) - These were small (1oz) soap bars, similar in size to hotel soap bars. The argument in favor of bars is that they last longer, but we’re not convinced that’s helpful for our clientele (who may not realistically be transporting a bar of soap from place to place until it’s used up). We therefore phased these out (after a year) in favor of the body wash gel.
  • Body Wash/Shampoo/Shaving Gel (10 packets) - This comes in single-use packets, and is labeled for all three uses, which is excellent.
  • Toothbrushes (12 toothbrushes) - They’re toothbrushes: they’re full size, and while they’re basic, they’re also not the weird kind that only has right angles and looks like a cartoon sketch of itself, nor are they handle-free ones. (See “a note on perceivable quality” below.)
  • Toothpaste (12 tubes) - When searching for this, a “travel size” tube is about 0.8 or 0.85oz. If you get 3oz tubes thinking that must be travel size because it’s what you can fly with, those are enormous, and they’re much too large to fit well in pockets. (Can you tell we messed this up once?)
  • Pads (6 pads of each size) - We asked period-having friends what to stock, and the big takeaways were that wings are not optional, and that a range of sizes/absorbencies is key. We’ll discuss which supplier we settled on below, but whichever you choose, get all their sizes/absorbencies, and then provide their selection chart on the container so that people know which size(s) they want.
  • Tampons (30 tampons) - For tampons, by contrast, we’ve only found “Regular” absorbencies set up for bulk distribution, so that’s what we distribute.
  • Hand Sanitizer (20 packets) - Hand sanitizer has been a frequent client request, but even small bottles are too expensive at our scale. We hand out Purell-branded single-serving packets with a perforated cardboard back, so you bend them in half and they squirt efficiently into your hand (they’re not like ketchup packets). We haven’t found any other vendors that make anything similar.
  • Razors (10 razors) - Simple, plastic safety razors with a few blades. We added these at visitor request, alongside the body wash above (because it’s also shaving gel). We expected to hand out two or three body washes per razor, but the opposite has been true. In speaking with visitors, we have learned that folks in Section 8 or similar subsidized housing can often get soap or body wash for free, but not razors, so being able to access some for free has been very appreciated.
• Masks (10 masks N95, 10 masks KN95) - We have both KN95 (earloop) and N95 (Aura trifold, back of head strap) masks, individually wrapped. The N95s we’re able to source at very low cost, but the KN95s are substantially more popular. We purchase them ourselves, but if we weren’t able to do that, our local Mask Bloc would be willing to help out as well.
• Other
  • Sunscreen (10 packets) - Originally we didn’t think that small packets of sunscreen would be valuable to visitors, because doctors recommend using 1oz of sunscreen and the packets are just a small fraction of that. After some time, we remembered that the 1oz recommendation is for swimming, where people are wearing very little clothing. Our clients are mostly clothed, so sunscreen is to protect their face and hands; the small packets are thus perfect.
  • Ibuprofen (10 two-pill packets) - Everyone gets headaches, muscle aches, etc., and while alcohol or illicit drugs can certainly numb pain, providing a non-intoxicating alternative means that people don’t need to use intoxicants for pain relief if they don’t wish to.
  • Earplugs (10 pairs) - We distribute reusable silicone earplugs on a string to make it easier to keep track of them. The idea is simple: to help keep down noise for people sleeping rough or in their cars.
  • Pencils (10 pencils) - We’ve always had pencils available with the comment cards, but they weren’t originally something we intended to give out. The fact that they went away near-daily showed us there was a need for them! We’ve had visitors tell us they especially appreciate the pencils, as they like to draw to pass the time.
  • Paper Bags (10 bags) - These are “sack lunch”-sized bags. We waited a long time to add these, for no real reason, but they’ve been very helpful to folks; so many of the things we distribute are in the category of “small thing that is easy to drop” that it’s a real boon to have a bag to put things in.
• Seasonal/Temporary
  • Hats (6 hats) - This was an explicit and repeated request from our clients. We prioritized wool-blend for this and the gloves specifically to ensure they keep people warm even when wet. These don’t seem to have multiple sizes.
  • Gloves (Warm) (6 pairs) - We introduced these alongside the hats. Again, wool-blend. There are adult and child sizes, and we distribute only adult. (As with the socks, our assumption is that people with smaller hands can fit into the larger gloves, but not vice versa.)
  • Hand Warmers (10 pairs) - Pairs of the hand-size warmers. Larger “body” warmers are also made, but we’ve standardized on the hand-size ones to buy at larger quantity (and thus bring prices down).
  • Water Bottles (2 bottles) - In summer 2026 we tried giving out (filled) reusable water bottles, as we finally found a source for $1 each in reasonable quantity. They got taken, but we’re not sure this is a project we’ll continue. We have thought about giving out disposable bottled water, but haven’t yet decided to do this.
  • Lead Tests (10 tests) - In fall 2024 we received funding from LilLabs [5]LilLabs to distribute soil and object lead tests, as a “citizen science” initiative. These have real utility, and they found their niche, but we haven’t decided to continue them.

Annual Totals

With two full years (Sept 1, 2024 - August 31, 2026) under our belt, and distributing at the per-day maximum rates above, here are our distribution totals:

Evolution

As you settle into your niche in your community, you will find what things your visitors need and don’t need. We have intentionally solicited feedback and requests from visitors since day one, and many of the things we distribute are the result of visitor requests: warm hats, razors and shaving gel, hand sanitizer, and pencils are just a few examples. We’ve also received feedback from subject-matter experts in different areas; as noted above, many of our wound care supplies, and all of our safer sex supplies, were things we added as a result of expert recommendations.

Taking on new ideas is wonderful; at the same time, it is critical that you be wary, even suspicious, of growth in what you give out. “Scope creep” is the term of art in tech (probably elsewhere!) to describe a project that does something, and then someone adds “just one more feature” repeatedly; this is why one popular text editor now includes both an email client and a psychoanalysis chatbot, or why (much worse) every random piece of crap on the Internet now includes a stochastic parrot branded as “AI.” Scope creep for a LFFC-like entity means you’ll outgrow your physical space and also do less well on the things you originally focused on, so try to choose a goal, pursue it, and avoid work outside that goal. Remember that unlimited growth is not helpful to you or to your community: the only thing that grows without limits is cancer.

For LFFC, our biggest scope limitation is that we have explicitly refused to offer food despite requests. There are a few reasons for this:

• Existing resources: there are several free pantries in a few-block radius of LFFC, as well as other sources of food (a local church that does extensive food distribution, a rescue mission, a food bank, etc.)
• Limited space: food is bulky, and there is finite space within our cabinets.
• Externalities: food requires secure storage space to avoid animal issues. This is top of mind for us, as early in the LFFC project, a family of rats made a home in our car’s engine and ate half the engine wiring harness, leading to an expensive repair and many jokes at our expense, so we really don’t want to attract more animals to our driveway. (The rats had nothing to do with LFFC, but if it had been filled with food, we are quite sure it would have added to the problem.)

The point is not that your project should avoid food, but that you should decide on your bounds intentionally, and be careful when revising them.

Suppliers

Let’s talk about Amazon. Many people considering this work will instinctively oppose using Amazon for supplies; after all, their world-scale tax evasion and record of forcing their employees to die for profit are, mildly, “bad.” We concur. That said, we have found some products that we can’t source elsewhere for anywhere near the same cost. You can choose whether to pay twice the cost for some products to avoid Amazon, or to be able to distribute more products; either is a reasonable choice. We’ve chosen Amazon (for the things listed below), but not without negative feelings about it.

Here’s where we get things:

• Eros Wholesale [7]Eros Wholesale: This former lingerie company (hence the name) now does great bulk supplies. They cover a broad swath of product quality, so it’s important to look carefully at what you’re ordering to ensure you’re not accidentally buying weird, user-hostile products (see the discussion about prison supplies above). Their shipping is also very stickershock-ish if you’ve grown used to “free” shipping; that said, even with shipping included, you won’t find better prices anywhere on the Internet for many of their products. They often have products of substantially higher quality (e.g., wool-blend socks, hats, and gloves) than BagsInBulk for around 10-20% more per unit than BiB’s cheaper-feeling alternatives, if you pay attention. (Ignore their combo “deals,”" which are usually ~30% more money for the same items than the unbundled prices.)
  • Source for: socks, soap, razors, hats, warm gloves, toothbrushes, toothpaste
• BagsInBulk [8]BagsInBulk: An alternative to Eros, but we’ve moved away from them for most supplies as our ability to buy larger orders has increased. One area they specialize in, however, is all-in-one care packages that can be handed out on the street, so if you’re interested in that, they’re your place.
  • Source for: Band-Aids in packs, sometimes socks if Eros doesn’t have what we need
• Medline at Home [9]Medline at Home: Medline is a hospital supplier, but they sell the same products to individuals via their “At Home” website. We would actually like to increase our use of Medline, but their pricing is… odd. It’s important to check that the pricing they offer is actually good before buying (for instance, their pricing is bad on nitrile gloves). That said, their shipping is incredibly fast.
  • Source for: ABD combine pads
• Amazon: We don’t really need to explain Amazon to you. AmazonBasics, their “low-cost” brand, is usually more expensive than other alternatives at LFFC’s scale, but one exception is very important: they are by far the best value we’ve found for maxi pads with wings in a variety of sizes/absorbencies, as discussed above. (It’s not even close, seriously.) Some other things come from different vendors within Amazon each order; Amazon seems to be the preferred method for vendors to sell stock reaching its listed end of life, so it’s a good source. (For instance, hospitals need to stock an enormous quantity of gloves in case of, well, waves hands at 2020, so when those are nearing the end of their shelf life they get sold at a discount.)
  • Source for: maxi pads, nitrile gloves, CoBan, earplugs, non-adherent pads, ponchos, pencils
• WarmSpark [10]WarmSpark: They just do handwarmers. They are good at handwarmers. In the winter of 2024-2025 we found that we could get HotHands (the brand name in this space) in bulk cheaper than any knockoff, but now (starting in late 2025) we’ve found that WarmSpark are substantially cheaper still and their quality is excellent.
  • Source for: hand warmers
• Wherever: There are some products that we search across the web for every time we order them, as the prices vary seemingly randomly. Sometimes these will end up coming from Amazon, and other times they’ll come from Nocturnal Aviation Associates, Ltd.
  • Source for: tampons, paper bags, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen, Vaseline

On masks: please be sure that if you’re buying masks, you are certain that you’re buying from a real dealer, and not someone re-logoing other products (often changing the protection rating as well, as a treat). Your local mask bloc is the best source for vendors that are trustworthy, but if you can’t find one, we use Bona Fide Masks [11]Bona Fide Masks, specifically because they sell Powecom KN95 masks with supply-chain traceability in single-mask packets. (They often have good coupon codes in their email newsletter, so if you’re going to use BFM, make sure to subscribe (a spam email address is fine) so that you can get those.)

A note on perceivable quality

When you’re looking for cost-effective stuff to hand out, you will come across what could be charitably described as “awful crap;” stuff that no one would use except in dire need. LFFC, by policy, doesn’t distribute anything we wouldn’t use ourselves, and we’re willing to spend a small amount of extra money to do that.

One example that may help to illustrate this: toothbrushes. Our toothbrush dealer has a range of toothbrushes available, but many of the cheapest ones fall into one of two categories:

• Toothbrushes designed for maximum-security prisons, in that they have very short handles (in one case, no handle at all, relying instead on a sleeve that fits over a finger) and are extremely bendy to prevent their being turned into shivs.
• Toothbrushes that have the size, shape, and/or construction of children’s pretend toys.

Every aid program will have its own balance between cost-efficiency and quality, but we would urge you to avoid things that are so cheap as to make visitors feel unvalued. The difference in cost is often pennies per month of distribution, but the difference in how visitors feel will be significant.

On doing “enough”

We’re going to talk very candidly about funds in this section, because one of our goals for LFFC is transparently and openly talk about what it takes to do projects like this. In doing so, however, we want to be very clear: this is the scale at which we do this, not the scale at which you must do this to be effective.

We decided to self-fund LFFC, at this scale, because we have the means to do so. Other people have very different financial situations. The key question for planning what your monthly or weekly expenditures should be is, simply: what can you afford to keep doing in perpetuity? If that means that you buy socks in bulk, and only distribute socks, because you can do that for around $8 a day, then do that. If you can do that and build a site, but your neighbors can contribute more, have them take responsibility for buying and restocking other items in your kiosk. Maybe each family on your block can supply one item continuously. There are lots of different ways to organize the funding; the only critical part, as discussed in “Maintain” below, is the consistency in restocking, so that you become a reliable part of the neighborhood, not a lottery ticket.

Should you rely on donations? We originally refused offers of donations until it became clear that doing so actually offended people greatly; our intention in doing so was to help people realize that they, too, could “just” give things away, but the message that people received was that they weren’t good enough to be allowed to help. So now we have some donations, which we appreciate, and which (as of September 2026) fund around 30% of our monthly costs. People are lovely, and want to feel a sense of having contributed to work that matters, so we’re letting them do so, but if all the donations stopped tomorrow we could (and would) continue regardless. It would be our recommendation that you do the same, as donations can (and will) come and go; accept them, but don’t rely on them. How best to accept them? Find a very-low-cost fundraising platform and set it up so that you have someplace to direct people if they so demand. (We use DonorBox [1]DonorBox, but if you use that, make sure to customize the notifications to make it clear that donations aren’t tax-deductible, as most of their clients are 501(c)(3) entities!)

Construction Costs

Construction costs are going to be tightly tied to your design and location. LFFC cost around $950 to build, excluding things like the charging station. The rebuild cost around the same (we didn’t have to redo the foundation and main beams, but we built a larger and better-designed roof). One could do the same thing somewhat more cheaply (e.g., we used real Simpson Strong-Tie brackets because we were curious to try them, but one could use cheaper alternatives with no loss of functionality).

Ongoing Costs

Backstock

For two full years of operations, we’ve spent $28,699.14 on things we hand out, and we have handed out $23,172.56 of that. (These numbers exclude construction costs, costs for bins, chargers, and everything else that isn’t an aid item.) The difference represents the value of the backstock–all the stuff in our garage that will be handed out. That difference ($5,526.58) is nearly as high as our backstock gets, and includes the first part of our buying winter supplies (e.g., nearly $800 of handwarmers), as well as pre-buying nearly $2,000 of common consumables as Trump starts a new trade war with Canada. (Christ, what an asshole.)

That high of a value of stuff that’s waiting to go outside feels inefficient in an era when people have grown used to just-in-time logistics. The reason behind it is slightly different for different categories of stuff:

• Things we maintain a slim backstock on, because just-in-time is fine and there aren’t real places to buy in gigantic quantity: earplugs are a great example of this. They get cheaper in bulk, but only up to about 200 pairs (of the kind we give out). Over 24 months, price fluctuations have been pretty small, and the supplier running out of stock hasn’t happened, so we don’t worry about it. Other examples: CoBan, Ibuprofen, Vaseline, non-adherent pads, maxi pads.

• Things we maintain a punctuated backstock on because the only quantity to buy is enormous: ABD combine pads, tampons, and ponchos are like this, where the only quantities for purchase are tiny (10-30) or enormous (300-600), but the bulk pricing discount is so big that it motivates buying in bulk and committing the storage space (and then slowly, slowly using it up). (Some examples: we buy ABD combine pads in boxes of 400, even though that’s nearly an entire year’s supply for us, because the discount is ridiculous. Bulk tampons seem only to come in boxes of 500. Ponchos are in boxes of 200 or 300.)

• Things we maintain a deep backstock on because we get progressive discounts and are worried about price shocks: This is the category that makes up the bulk of the value in the backstock. Our supplier for socks, in particular, gives a progressive discount where each case is substantially cheaper if you buy more cases. This leads to our sock orders being 1,800 pairs or more, which is… a lot of socks to be honest. (1800 pairs is nine boxes, each 2ft x 2ft x 2ft; they take up a lot of space.) That said, the deal was incredible, and these items are very vulnerable to price shocks (in particular, from the random tariff policy of the US). Buying socks in smallish bulk (240 pairs at a time) got us a cost of $1.17/pair; buying them in this giant quantity gets us $0.72/pair for substantially better socks (thermal-weight wool-blend, instead of cotton-blend athletic socks). A 40% cost reduction would be major even if we hadn’t also gone up significantly in quality.

COGGA

We publish our Cost of Goods Given Away (COGGA) every month at https://lffc.us/posts/https://lffc.us/posts/. It’s very seasonal, because the most expensive things we give out are hats and gloves, which we only do in the winter. Our winter COGGA is thus in the $1,200-$1,400 range, whereas our summer COGGA is more like $500-$800. Our overall COGGA averages fairly precisely to $1,000/month across a whole year.

Out-of-Pocket

Our actual out-of-pocket outlay is very bursty, as you’d expect from the above discussions, with some months being less than $500, and some being nearly $3,500 (it was a really large sock order, among many other things). Over time, though, it, too, averages to around $1,000/month.

Daily Restock

There isn’t a substitute for going out and checking supplies daily, and we suggest you plan on that. Once you get your habits set up–place things in your backstock area for efficiency, have a good system for taking notes on what needs doing, etc.—a restock might take only 5-10 minutes per day, and early on (as word is only getting out) you may not have much to do. Regardless, daily restocks will provide benefits:

• Topping up items each day that have been only partially consumed (e.g., someone takes 3 of 30 tampons, but you refill back to 30) helps show people that this is an ongoing resource, not a one-shot donation. That will help people feel safe relying on its continued presence, which will encourage word-of-mouth; it will also help show people that they don’t need to take everything available because it won’t be there tomorrow. (We think of the latter issue as the “desert rain” phenomenon: plants and animals in a desert go into a huge burst of activity when rain happens, as they know they have only a short time to exploit it. As a site host, it’s entirely understandable, but somewhat annoying when you’re putting out ten bars of soap every day and knowing they’re all going to one person! It has been our experience that continued daily restocks will eventually alleviate the issue.)
• Actually going and interacting with the kiosk will ensure you see things that are broken or breaking, things that are unexpected and causing issues, or other small problems before they become big problems. It might also give you ideas; it took us a couple of weeks of noticing that the suggestion card pencils were nearly always missing before we decided simply to stock pencils as one of our items, because the community was clearly stating a need.
• Candidly, it’s nice to have one thing you can do every day to oppose the extreme amount of evil and hatred being spread by the literal fascists in charge of the US right now. It’s better than screaming into your pillow!

Heartbreak

Some people are shitty. Some people will leave messes. Some people (in our experience, usually local truant middle-schoolers) will intentionally destroy naloxone. Some people will leave comments with needs you can’t possibly address, but which are emotionally devastating to think that people have to live with.

A few tips derived only from our experience; take them or leave them as you feel appropriate:

• Remember that houseless and indigent people aren’t ambassadors, they’re just people. Therefore, like any group of people, some of them will be assholes. That doesn’t reflect on all houseless or indigent people, any more than the one fat guy cutting you off in traffic means that all fat people are dangerous drivers.
• You’re interacting with the community, and some parts of any community suck. It’s good for you to have a different sample than your job exposes you to.
• If you like a bit of woo, just as a treat: you’re attempting to put good into a system that is severely good-deficient. Like getting into a cold sleeping bag and warming it up, it’s going to take a while before you feel the warm (or good) being reflected back at you from your surroundings–but in the interim, you’re still putting the correct energy into the system.

Conclusion

It will take work. It will take effort. It will cause all manner of odd conversations (We’ve had multiple coworkers ask why we keep taking photos of our cats on top of literal thousands of socks; the answer, of course, is that they’re cats, and the socks are forming a high promontory from which to look down on us). It will, occasionally, be a pain in your ass.

The alternative, however, is allowing suffering to continue that you, personally, through just individual effort, could alleviate. As we hope we’ve shown in this zine, this is doable. It will require effort, but it’s not beyond the scope of one person, or one small group of people, to do some real helping. It doesn’t require an organization. It doesn’t require a political party. (It doesn’t rule out building those things either!)

So put on your big-girl panties and put some fucking socks out on your driveway.

“Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” - SgtMaj Daniel Daly