Feed Philly Coalition

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Feed Philly Coalition

Feed Philly Coalition is an advocacy group that helps fight against hunger & promotes a culture of food upcycling.

We are a collaborative effort of food rescues, soup kitchens, restaurants, & food retailers that strive to reduce food insecurity in Philly.

09/24/2026

The city just found four million dollars for food relief.

Everybody wants to argue about whether that's enough. Skip it. Somebody else already made that case, and made it well, and it isn't the interesting question anymore.

Here's the one nobody's asking: what should four million dollars actually buy?

On November 1st, Mayor Cherelle Parker signed an executive order launching the One Philly SNAP Support Plan. Four million dollars, immediately, to food distribution nonprofits across the city. Two million of that went, combined, straight to Share Food Program and Philabundance, the two biggest food banks in the region.

Here's the structural part that actually matters to a coalition like ours. An executive order isn't a budget line item. It's discretionary. It's one time money. One mayor's signature created it, and a different signature, or a different administration, could end it.

So one time money should never be spent like it's forever. It should be spent on things that outlast the signature that made it.

Not another truckload of canned goods that's gone in a week. A walk in freezer that runs for a decade. A delivery truck that doesn't break down on distribution day. A second shift on a Thursday afternoon, when the line still stretches around the block. An enrollment navigator who can get a family signed up for benefits in one visit instead of three.

Food disappears. Refrigeration doesn't. A truck doesn't. A trained navigator who knows the paperwork doesn't.

If you run a pantry, a kitchen, or a mutual aid table in this city: what's the one asset you'd buy with money that might not be here next year? Tell us. Tell your city council member. Tell the coalition before the next signature changes the plan.

Source: City of Philadelphia, Office of the Mayor, November 1 and November 26, 2025. https://www.phila.gov/2025-11-26-city-of-philadelphia-delivers-over-6-2-million-in-rapid-assistance-through-one-philly-initiatives-supporting-food-access-small-businesses-and-housing-stability/
Full story on the blog: https://feedphillycoalition.org/blog/what-four-million-in-food-money-should-buy

09/11/2026

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result has a name, and we have been doing it with food insecurity for a long time.

I want to be careful here, because this is not me throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of the existing ideas are good ideas. The people working in this space are doing yeoman's work and they deserve to be supported, not replaced.

But there is a delta between what we are feeding now and what we need to feed. That gap does not close by running the same programs harder.

So we need to think differently. Progressively. With sustainability in mind, and past the end of the current grant cycle.

The ideas are not the problem. The system around them is.

09/09/2026

Philadelphia already wrote its urban agriculture plan. 87 actions. Six goals. Ten years. Published in 2023 as Growing from the Root, built with the people who actually run the city's gardens and farms.

Three years in, a City Council task force spent seventeen months studying food access across Philadelphia. Its headline recommendation was not a new plan. It was permission to finally run the one we already have.

WHICH OF THE 87 ACTIONS HAVE AN OWNER.
WHICH ONES HAVE A BUDGET.
WHICH ONES HAVE A DATE ON A CALENDAR.

That is the whole ask, and it is not a small one. Somebody should be able to answer it, in public, with a name attached.

Meanwhile the work is already happening without waiting for permission. Philadelphia is growing food on roughly 450 active plots covering close to 130 acres right now, neighbors turning vacant lots and rowhouse yards into real food. The plan exists to back that work up with land, funding and staff time. A ten year plan with no public accounting of what got funded is not a policy. It is a document sitting in a drawer.

Who owns action one? We would love to know.

Source: Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, Growing from the Root (2023); Philadelphia City Council Food and Nutrition Security Task Force report (June 2026).
Full story on the blog: https://feedphillycoalition.org/blog/philadelphia-87-actions-urban-agriculture-plan

09/05/2026

My tagline for this work is from potholes to people.

If you call City Hall about a pothole, somebody owns that. There is a person, a budget and a process. If you are hungry, it is nowhere near as clear who picks up the phone.

That is not an intellectual problem. Everybody agrees hunger is bad. It is a structural one, and it is why the first recommendation we are pushing is a permanent position inside City Hall that owns food insecurity.

We have been working on it through the Food and Nutritional Task Force, alongside City Council President Kenyatta Johnson's office, SHARE and The Food Trust.

We are also standing up the Feed Philly Corporation as a B Corp. The business of feeding people.

08/27/2026

Pennsylvania served nearly 93 million school breakfasts last year. Not one child had to prove anything to get one.

Universal free breakfast is funded again in the bipartisan budget signed in July, covering all 1.7 million students in the state. Breakfasts served have gone up 13.8 percent in two years. Governor Josh Shapiro put it plainly: "Our kids can't learn on an empty stomach."

What makes it work is the part nobody puts in a press release. There is no form. There is no separate line. The meal is just there, the way a textbook is there, and the child who eats it is not marked out from the child sitting beside them.

Four hours later, that reasoning stops.

Lunch still runs on income. Either a family fills out an application, or a federal formula covers an entire school at once.

Philadelphia sits on the covered side of that formula. Every student in the School District of Philadelphia gets breakfast, lunch and dinner at no cost, with no application, because the District qualifies for the Community Eligibility Provision. It is a good outcome reached by a strange route, and it does not follow a child into a district that does not qualify.

School starts here on August 24.

If checking a family's income before breakfast was not worth the administrative cost or the stigma, what changes about that four hours later?

Source: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro Hands Out Breakfast to Upper Dublin Students (May 28, 2026). https://www.pa.gov/governor/newsroom/2026-press-releases/governor-shapiro-hands-out-breakfast-to-upper-dublin-students

08/25/2026

Americans wasted less food last year, and the biggest single piece of that drop came out of home kitchens.

ReFED's new report puts total surplus food at 70 million tons in 2024. That is down 2.2 percent from 2023, the first real decline since the pandemic dip. Nearly 950,000 tons of the reduction was residential. ReFED president Dana Gunders explained it this way: "With higher food prices, Americans are looking for ways to extend their grocery dollars. Using up more of what they're already purchasing and wasting less is proving to be one of the most accessible ways to do it."

So households changed how they shop and cook, with no program and no budget behind them.

Here is the other number in the same report. Just under 13 percent of the food that could have been donated actually was. The report counts that against the food already sorted as edible, safe and ready to hand over.

Which tells you the gap is not supply.

Moving surplus to a person takes cold storage, a van, a driver, and a short window between a kitchen closing and the food turning. A restaurant on Passyunk at 10pm does not have those sitting idle. Neither does a corner store in Hunting Park.

Philadelphia already has the kitchens, the routes and the people willing to drive. What would it take to connect them into one recovery system this year?

Source: ReFED, Progress on the Plate: 2026 U.S. Food Waste Report (2026). https://refed.org/food-waste/refed-us-food-waste-report-2026/

08/12/2026

In 2025, state legislatures across the United States introduced 110 food-waste-related bills. Twenty-four of them passed. Maine became the 12th state in the country with a formal food-waste diversion policy on the books.

That number matters.

When federal leadership on food policy contracts, the argument is sometimes made that nothing can be done. That the problem is too large, too systemic, or too politically complicated to move.

The 2025 state legislative record says otherwise.

Twenty-four bills passed is not a revolution. But it is a pattern. Twelve states have now demonstrated that food-waste diversion can be written into law. The infrastructure does not require a single federal mandate. It gets built one state at a time, through elected officials who decide the problem is worth addressing.

Feed Philly Coalition has been making this argument for years. Food insecurity and food waste are two sides of the same policy failure. The food exists. The need exists. The gap is the infrastructure and the will to build it.

The 2025 data gives us something concrete to point to. Policy works. Twenty-four states proved it last year. More will this year.

Source: ReFED, 2026 US Food Waste Policy Report, via Sustainable America (April 21, 2026). https://sustainableamerica.org/blog/2026-food-waste-policy-report/

08/08/2026

The food exists. The need exists. What is missing is the system.

The United States wastes approximately $380 billion worth of food every single year.

In that same year, 48 million Americans were food insecure.

Less than 13% of donatable food is actually donated.

Read those three figures together. This is not a supply shortage. It is not a generosity deficit. It is a failure of the infrastructure that would connect surplus to need. Policy, logistics, and funding are the missing pieces. Not will.

When the system is broken, pointing at individuals does not fix anything. Building the coordinating infrastructure does.

That is the model Feed Philly Coalition is organized around. Not charity. Not awareness campaigns. Infrastructure that moves food from where it is to where it needs to be.

What do you think it would take to close that 13% gap in Philadelphia?

Source: ReFED, 2026 US Food Waste Report (2026). https://refed.org/food-waste/the-problem/

08/05/2026

BREAKING NEWS (Not Really., Just Trying To Get Your Attention): The Future of School Food Isn't Coming...It's Already Here and been here.

For years we've been told that healthier, locally sourced school meals are simply too expensive, too complicated, or impossible to scale.

California just proved otherwise.

A nonprofit called Conscious Kitchen is helping transform the school food system by connecting schools directly with local farms, organizing purchasing cooperatives, redesigning the supply chain, and proving that public dollars can strengthen children's health and local agriculture at the same time. The organization now works with more than 100 school districts and is pursuing a vision of reaching 6 million schoolchildren across California.

This isn't just about better lunches.

It's about better systems.

Every school meal is also an economic development decision.

Every procurement contract is an opportunity to support local farmers.

Every food dollar can strengthen regional supply chains instead of sending money somewhere else.

This is exactly why the Feed Philly Coalition believes we must stop thinking about hunger as a charity problem and start treating food as critical infrastructure.

Imagine if Philadelphia connected:

Local farms
Schools
Hospitals
Government
Restaurants
Distributors
Urban agriculture
Community organizations
..into one coordinated regional food ecosystem.

That's how you create healthier children.

That's how you strengthen local businesses.

That's how you build resilient neighborhoods.

And that's how you reduce food insecurity.

The question is no longer whether it can be done.

The question is:

Whatcha gonna do Philly? 'Bron Just Came From Cali...Just Saying...

Source: Civil Eats, "Conscious Kitchen Wants to Bring Organic Food to 6 Million California Schoolchildren" (July 21, 2026). https://civileats.com/2026/07/21/conscious-kitchen-wants-to-bring-organic-food-to-6-million-california-schoolchildren/

07/30/2026

An organization called The Everywhere Project recently came on my radar setting up in Love Park just steps from Philadelphia City Hall.
What I found out was one of the most inspiring things I've seen in a long time.

For more than FIVE YEARS, they have never missed a Wednesday night. Not once. Rain. Heat. Cold (-5 Degrees!) Holidays. They simply show up. Every. Single. Week.

Together, they've now served more than FIVE MILLION meals—enough, as they proudly pointed out, to feed every Philadelphian a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner!

And here's the part that floored me...

This isn't a huge organization with an army of paid staff.

These are ordinary people with full-time jobs who somehow find the time to organize dozens of volunteers every week because they refuse to let their neighbors go hungry.

There's something profoundly symbolic about it.

Just a stone's throw from City Hall, while conversations about poverty, hunger, and homelessness continue inside meeting rooms, these incredible human beings are outside quietly doing the work—one hot meal, one bag of groceries, one act of kindness at a time.

No fanfare.
No excuses.
Just action.

A huge shout-out to my new friends Shannon Ashe, Tom Frey, Xavier, and every volunteer who makes this happen week after week. Thank you for reminding me what leadership, compassion, and community really look like.

I'll also admit something...I am honestly embarrassed that I hadn't heard of them sooner. We all should be if you don't either.

How is one of Philadelphia's most inspiring organizations also one of its best-kept secrets?

Let's change that.

If you have time...Volunteer.

If you have resources...Donate.

If you have food, kitchen space, connections, or simply a desire to help...Reach out.

They need volunteers. They need partners. They need people willing to say, "How can I help?"

Philadelphia is a better city because The Everywhere Project exists.
Now let's make sure more people know it.
See you next Wednesday!

Address

Philadelphia, PA

Telephone

+12154060774

Website

https://feedphillycoalition.org/

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