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Keith McHenry is an American activist, best known as the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He also co-founded Homes Not Jails and contributed to the founding of the Independent Media Center.
Starting in 1975, McHenry attended Boston University, studying painting and sculpture. He took a class in American history with Howard Zinn. Keith and his work with Food Not Bombs is mentioned in Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Zinn wrote the introduction to McHenry's first two books.
In 1988, McHenry moved to San Francisco, where he started a second Food Not Bombs group. He was one of nine volunteers arrested for sharing food and literature at Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988. In the following years, Keith was arrested over 100 times for serving free food in city parks; he spent over 500 nights in jail. He faced 25 years to life in prison under the California Three Strikes Law, but in 1995, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission brought about his release.
He has started Food Not Bombs groups around the world. He gave up his graphics design career to pursue FNB. In 2005, he helped coordinate food relief as well as shipments of clothing and other supplies to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. In 2012, he founded the Food Not Bombs Free Skool, which teaches a summer course covering social issues, community organizing, nonviolent social change, cultural events, and sustainable agriculture.
In 2021, McHenry came out as an anti-COVID vaccination activist, publishing a post noting the left used to question authority but in 2020 they fell in line with that authoritarian state and military that saying, in part, "(...) I first wrote a letter on this subject when I received an invitation to attend a meeting forming a new progressive alliance. To participate you had to provide proof of a vaccination or a negative COVID test. I wrote to invite the progressive community to stand in solidarity with the working class by refusing to meet in facilities that demand proof of participation in the vaccine experiments."
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