Philadelphia Wrote the Report. It Still Has Not Built the Office.

The report is finished. The office is not. I know because I sat on the task force that spent more than two years producing the recommendation, appointed by City Council President Kenyatta Johnson to a table that included food bank leaders, farmers, nutrition researchers and city staff who agreed on the same headline ask before they agreed on much else. On June 24, 2026, Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force released its recommendations, and the first one, ahead of every other idea in the report, was to create a permanent Office of Food and Nutrition Security inside city government. Council President Johnson has said he intends to introduce legislation this fall to build it. I believe he means it. I also know exactly what the space between a recommendation and a bill costs the people who cannot wait for either one.

What I Actually Sat Through

I am a fellow at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia focused on food economy and policy, which is the reason Council President Johnson’s office asked me onto this task force in the first place, alongside representatives from organizations like SHARE Food Program and The Food Trust, whose leaders, George Matysik and Mark Edwards, jointly chaired the group. City Council created the task force by resolution back in January 2024, so by the time the recommendations became public this June, the work behind them had been going on for well over two years. I bring that up not to claim any special credit for the report. I bring it up because I want to be honest about what I watched happen in that room. Nobody at that table treated the office as an extra layer of paperwork. Every organization represented there already runs some piece of the emergency response the report describes, and every one of us has felt what it costs to run that response without anyone coordinating it citywide.

What Philadelphia Is Missing Without It

Sitting on the task force meant watching, meeting after meeting, how much of Philadelphia’s current food response runs on relationships between individual people rather than on any standing structure. A program director at one organization knows a counterpart at another well enough to call when a shipment falls through. A city staffer who already has a full time job somewhere else picks up food policy coordination as an extra responsibility, because nobody’s actual job title includes it. That is not a failure of the people doing it. Organizations across this city, from SHARE Food Program to Philabundance to dozens of smaller pantries, hold this system together through genuine skill and genuine relationships. But a system that depends on which two people happen to know each other is not a system Philadelphia can plan around, and it is exactly what an actual office, with an actual mandate to coordinate across departments and organizations, is supposed to replace. That is the plain, unglamorous case for governance coming first among the task force’s recommendations, and it is the case I found most convincing once I watched it argued out loud in that room.

The Recommendation, and What It Is Not Yet

Here is what I want to be precise about, because precision is the whole argument. The task force did not introduce a bill. City Council’s own release of the recommendations states plainly that Council President Kenyatta Johnson intends to introduce legislation this fall to establish the office, after spending the summer working with the Parker Administration and task force members on the actual proposal. That is a real commitment from an elected official who has followed through on this task force before. He created it by resolution in January 2024, and he stayed with it for more than two years of hearings and drafting before the recommendations became public this June. It is not, yet, a law. The distinction matters more than it might sound like it does, because a report can describe exactly the right fix and still leave the fix undone for as long as a legislative calendar takes. Believing Johnson will introduce the bill this fall is not the same thing as the office already existing, and treating the two as the same thing is exactly the mistake I want to argue against here.

What the Wait Costs While the Bill Is Still a Promise

This is the part of the report that a City Hall recommendation cannot capture, because it runs on a much shorter clock than a legislative session. About 312,000 Philadelphians, roughly one in five residents of this city, experience food insecurity in a given year, and that count does not pause for the fall legislative calendar any more than a grocery bill does. It costs a parent choosing between the electric bill and the grocery bill this week, not next fall. It costs a kid whose school breakfast is the one guaranteed meal of the day, today, regardless of what City Council does in September. It costs a senior on a fixed income doing arithmetic at the register this afternoon. It costs the food banks and pantries I mentioned earlier trying to plan for a winter they cannot yet fully budget, because the coordinated citywide response the task force recommended does not exist yet as an actual office with an actual budget line. None of that is a criticism of Council President Johnson’s timeline. Legislation takes the time it takes. It is a description of the gap that timeline leaves open right now, and why closing it matters.

Why I Am Not Treating the Report as the Finish Line

I do not want to undersell what the task force accomplished, because I watched the work happen and it was real. The Philadelphia Tribune’s coverage of the report and 6ABC’s reporting on the same recommendations both treated the office recommendation as the headline, and they were right to. Governance sounds like the dull part of a hunger report right up until you have sat through years of watching emergency response get coordinated across departments that were never actually built to do that job together. What I am arguing is narrower than either article had room for. A recommendation is not the same thing as a director with a budget and a mandate. Philadelphia has done the hard, slow work of diagnosis. It has not yet done the harder work of building the thing the diagnosis called for, and the distance between those two facts is measured in the same weeks and months a family without the office is measuring in missed meals.

Introduce the Bill This Fall

I sat in that room because the Economy League sent me there to argue food policy as economic policy, not as charity. I am writing this because the same instinct applies to what happens next. Council President Johnson has committed to introducing legislation this fall to create the Office of Food and Nutrition Security the task force recommended. I take him at his word, and I will be watching City Council when the fall session resumes to see the actual bill. Philadelphia does not need another task force, another report or another recommendation. It already has all three, and they agree with each other. What it needs now is the office the report already named, on the timeline the Council President already promised, so the next time someone tells a hungry neighbor that the city has a plan, the plan is a place with a phone number and a director, not a paragraph in a report from last June.