Philadelphia Needs a Front Door for Hunger

The final report from Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force landed on June 23, 2026, and I had been waiting for it the way you wait for something you helped build. For seventeen months I sat on that task force. I attended the meetings, read the testimony, worked through the findings with the other members, and helped shape what eventually became a formal set of recommendations to Philadelphia City Council. When the document came out, the feeling was not relief that the work was done. It was something closer to clarity. Philadelphia finally has a name for what it needs.

What the Task Force Was Built to Do

Philadelphia City Council established this task force through resolution, and Council President Kenyatta Johnson convened it with a direct mandate: figure out what is wrong with the way Philadelphia addresses hunger, and propose something better. The inaugural meeting took place in early February 2025, and the group spent seventeen months examining the city’s food sector from the ground up.

The task force brought together 25 leaders and experts from across the city, representing urban agriculture, food distribution, retail, nutrition, healthcare, and advocacy organizations. George Matysik, Executive Director of SHARE Food Program, and Mark Edwards, President and CEO of The Food Trust, served as chairs of the group. Around that table sat representatives from Philabundance, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, MANNA, Sharing Excess, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, United Way of Greater Philadelphia, the Common Market, the Reinvestment Fund, the Philadelphia Corporation for the Aging, and a dozen other organizations working across every dimension of the food security question. These were not people sent to attend meetings. These were the people running the programs, making the decisions, and living close enough to the problem to understand what the data cannot capture on its own.

The task force worked through public testimony, community listening sessions, stakeholder interviews, and working group research across 2025 and into 2026. The goal was not to produce another report that sat on a shelf. The goal was a set of actionable recommendations that Council could take into legislation.

The Number That Stops the Conversation

I want to put one figure on the table before anything else, because it reframes every policy discussion that follows. Roughly 312,000 Philadelphians do not have reliable access to enough food. That is approximately one in five residents of this city.

Within that number are facts that are harder still to sit with. Childhood hunger in Philadelphia reached 30.5 percent in 2023, up from roughly 24 percent in 2019, according to Axios Philadelphia’s reporting on the city’s worsening rates. More than 103,000 children in this city are going without reliable food access. As of early 2026, 27 percent of Philadelphia’s population was enrolled in SNAP, the federal nutrition assistance program that has been absorbing pressure from federal budget decisions while local demand rises. And the burden is not distributed equally across the city. Black and Hispanic households in Philadelphia experience food insecurity at more than three times the rate of white households, with roughly one in four Black Philadelphians and one in four Hispanic Philadelphians facing the reality of not knowing where the next meal comes from.

These are not numbers generated at a distance from the problem. They came out of the research this task force commissioned and reviewed. They were in the room with us at every meeting, and they never stopped being people.

The Finding Beneath the Finding

Here is what seventeen months of testimony and research made clear, and it is not what most people expect when they think about hunger policy. Philadelphia does not lack organizations working on food insecurity. It lacks coordination among them.

Philabundance distributes tens of millions of pounds of food across the region every year. SHARE Food Program operates one of the largest food distribution networks in the country. The Food Trust runs nutrition education and food access programming across dozens of Philadelphia schools and neighborhoods. MANNA delivers medically tailored meals to neighbors managing serious illness. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia runs clinical interventions for health conditions connected to food access. United Way connects donors to service organizations across the city. Every one of these institutions does serious, sustained, effective work.

None of them has a shared front door in city government.

That is the finding. Not that the organizations are failing. Not that the people doing the work are anything less than extraordinary. But that Philadelphia has never built the structure that connects them to one another, sets shared priorities across the whole system, or coordinates the city’s response to hunger as a single function rather than a collection of parallel efforts running in their own lanes. The task force spent seventeen months mapping that gap. The map is not a comfortable thing to look at, because the gap is not new. It is old. It has been there long enough that we stopped noticing it as a gap and started thinking of it as how things work.

It is not how things should work.

Six Recommendations, One Central Argument

The report that came out on June 23rd contains six recommendations. The first, and the one that everything else builds on, is the creation of a permanent Office of Food and Nutrition Security within city government. A standing office whose job is food. Not a task force. Not a temporary working group. A permanent function inside the structure of the city, accountable year after year for the same question: are Philadelphians eating?

The other five recommendations build from that foundation. The report calls for expanding enrollment support for SNAP and WIC, so that residents who qualify are actually receiving the benefits they are already owed. It calls for developing food access strategies across all City Council districts, designed by and for the communities experiencing the problem rather than imposed from the outside. It recommends investment in neighborhood food infrastructure and healthy retail options, recognizing that a food desert is not a personal failure of the people living in it. It calls for broadening nutrition education programming so that access and knowledge move together. And it calls for coordinated Food as Medicine initiatives that connect healthcare providers with food access organizations, because hunger and chronic illness live in the same households and should not be treated by separate systems that never speak to each other.

What ties all six together is a single argument that I believe the task force got exactly right. Food security is a systems problem, not a behavior problem. You do not solve hunger at this scale by asking 312,000 people to try harder. You solve it by building the infrastructure that treats food as a civic responsibility on the same level as transit or public health, not as a charity drive that restarts every calendar year.

What Legislation Would Actually Change

Council President Kenyatta Johnson committed to introducing legislation when Council returns in the fall to create the Office of Food and Nutrition Security. The Food Trust’s account of the report release describes the moment as Philadelphia taking a major step toward a more connected food system. The language is right. What I would add is the part that matters most to me after seventeen months in those meetings: the step is not just toward connection. It is toward accountability.

An office means a budget line that survives the next administration. It means a team of people whose entire job is to track the numbers, coordinate the organizations, and report back to elected officials and residents on whether the work is working. It means that people with lived experience of food insecurity have a seat at the table where policy is made, not just at a public hearing that closes when the meeting ends. It means that the next time a federal program cuts benefits or a supply chain disrupts a food bank’s operations, there is a phone to call in city government whose job it is to pick up.

Philadelphia has the organizations. It has the data. It has the people. What it has been missing is the structure that holds it all together. If the legislation moves in the fall the way it should, this city will finally have a front door for this work. And the 312,000 residents who need it will not have to figure out on their own which door to knock on.

What the Task Force Was Built to Do

The Number That Stops the Conversation

The Finding Beneath the Finding

Six Recommendations, One Central Argument

What Legislation Would Actually Change

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