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Pew's Philadelphia Research and the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Pew researchers track poverty, food access, jobs and arts funding in Philadelphia every year. The harder question is what the city does next.

By Harry Hayman 7 min read
Pew's Philadelphia Research and the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

The rooms where Philadelphia’s data gets wrestled into clarity are not dramatic places. They are conference rooms and offices, spreadsheets and policy briefs, conversations that happen well behind the neighborhoods whose numbers fill the charts. Harry Hayman has spent enough time in those rooms to understand what separates the useful from the merely rigorous: someone willing to ask what comes next. Not just what the data shows, but what the city plans to do about it. Over the years, his work as PAGE Project Manager at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia has put him alongside people at the Pew Charitable Trusts who carry both the research and the question of application in the same breath. The appreciation he expressed publicly about those colleagues is not about sentiment. It is about something more specific: the difference between a city that accumulates knowledge about itself and one that acts on what it learns.

The Research Operation That Philadelphia Runs on

The Pew Charitable Trusts has maintained a research presence in Philadelphia that extends well beyond its national policy work. Its Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative publishes annual State of the City reports that track more than a dozen indicators at once: poverty rates, unemployment, crime trends, housing costs, public health outcomes, educational attainment, and how Philadelphia measures against peer cities across the country. The 2026 edition, covered in depth by the Philadelphia Inquirer, documented a city at a genuine crossroads. Philadelphia’s poverty rate fell below 20 percent for the first time since 1979, reaching 19.7 percent by 2024. Homicides in 2025 hit their lowest level in nearly 60 years, at 222. Shooting victims fell below 1,000 for the first time since at least 2007. These are meaningful numbers, and they arrived in the same report alongside some harder ones: median household income flatlined at around $60,500, roughly $20,000 below the national average, and the city’s unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent in 2025, exceeding both regional and national figures at the time.

This is what distinguishes research aimed at informing policy from advocacy dressed in statistics. The Pew work names the progress and names the stagnation in the same document, without softening either. That intellectual honesty is what makes it worth taking seriously, and it is the kind of work Harry Hayman has found himself engaged with directly, across several years and several different policy threads.

What the Food Insecurity Numbers Actually Mean

Among the threads Harry has worked through with colleagues at Pew is food insecurity, a topic where the gap between research and action is particularly visible and particularly costly. More than 210,000 Philadelphians, roughly 13.6 percent of the city’s population, face ongoing food insecurity, according to data cited by the Feed Philly Coalition. The disparity across communities is sharp: 22 percent of Black households and 23 percent of Hispanic households in the city lack reliable access to nutritious food. Among Philadelphia’s children, the rate reaches 25 percent. These numbers sit alongside the poverty figures that Pew tracks annually, and together they describe a city where a substantial share of residents spend significant daily energy managing a problem that research consistently shows is addressable through institutional action rather than episodic goodwill.

Harry’s work with the Feed Philly Coalition and through his Economy League fellowship has been grounded in the argument that food security is a systems problem, not a charity problem. The procurement decisions made by hospitals, school systems, universities, and city agencies determine more about who eats reliably in Philadelphia than any single food drive. Research that documents the scope of food insecurity matters only when the people reading it are positioned to change the systems that produce it, and willing to do so. That is the distinction Harry keeps returning to.

”Philadelphia doesn’t need another room full of smart people talking about what could happen. We need people willing to work on making it happen.”

That is what Harry wrote publicly about the colleagues whose paths he has crossed at Pew. It is not a critique of the research itself. It is a recognition that research and action are different things, and that the value of the first depends entirely on what people do with the second.

Economic Opportunity and the Distance Between Data and Action

The economic picture that Pew’s research tracks year after year shows genuine progress in some areas and stubborn stagnation in others. WHYY’s coverage of the 2025 State of the City report documented job growth of 2.1 percent in Philadelphia in 2024, exceeding the national average of 1.3 percent. The city’s unemployment rate, which peaked at 12.4 percent in 2020, had fallen to 4.5 percent by 2024. Earlier reporting by WHYY on the 2024 edition showed that the share of Philadelphia adults with at least a four-year degree rose by 12 percentage points over the preceding decade, with more than half of residents aged 25 to 34 now holding at least a bachelor’s degree. Nonfarm employment in the city grew by 105,000 jobs between 2014 and 2024.

None of those numbers, standing alone, tells a complete policy story. They are data points. The question that researchers and the people Harry Hayman works alongside are asking is what the city’s institutions are doing to make that progress visible at the household level. A declining unemployment rate looks different to a family in Kensington than it does on a regional labor market graph. The work Harry values in his colleagues is the work of keeping both pictures in frame at once: the aggregate trend and the neighborhood reality, the number and what it actually means for the people behind it.

Arts, Culture, and the Infrastructure That Pew Helps Fund

One dimension of Philadelphia life where Pew engages with particular directness is arts and culture, through the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The Center operates as a nonprofit grantmaking organization and a knowledge resource for cultural institutions in Philadelphia, and it has been among the city’s most consistent sources of funding for arts organizations and individual artists. Across its history the Center has awarded more than $201 million through 2,032 grants and 424 Pew Fellowships for artists working in the Philadelphia region. Each year the Center names a new cohort of 12 Pew Fellows, selected by nomination in recognition of the ambition and quality of their practice.

The grantmaking structure the Center uses focuses on two main categories: Performance grants and Exhibitions and Public Interpretation grants, each designed to allow institutions and individual artists to develop work that would not otherwise find adequate support in a funding environment where arts budgets routinely compete with more immediate civic needs. Harry Hayman has argued consistently that the health of Philadelphia’s cultural infrastructure, its jazz venues, mural programs, galleries, and performance spaces, is as relevant to the city’s long-term identity and economic health as its physical infrastructure. The Center’s sustained investment in Philadelphia’s arts ecosystem reflects a similar institutional conviction.

What Makes Research Worth Having

Harry Hayman has been in enough meetings and attended enough presentations to recognize the difference between research that changes something and research that fills a shelf. The people at Pew whose paths he has crossed over the years do not simply produce reports. They return to Philadelphia’s hardest questions year after year: the poverty that persists even as the overall rate falls, the food access gaps that spread across entire zip codes, the arts organizations that require sustained outside support to remain viable, the neighborhoods where aggregate growth figures look nothing like what residents experience week to week. That sustained attention is harder to maintain than a single study. It requires people who believe the questions matter enough to keep asking them.

Philadelphia is not short on data about itself. The Pew research enterprise is part of what makes the city unusually well-documented among American cities of its size. What it is sometimes shorter on is the willingness to let that documentation determine what happens next. Harry’s public acknowledgment of the colleagues he has worked alongside at Pew is really an acknowledgment of that distinction. The research exists. The knowledge about food insecurity and economic mobility and arts funding and neighborhood conditions is there and detailed and updated. The city’s work, as Harry keeps framing it, is to close the distance between knowing and doing.

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