Absolutely. It's a great question and it's what we do every day. Our last mile home delivery work is been truly a growing effort since the pandemic changed the food system and we pivoted how we serve our community. And the examples that I gave in the testimony are just a small snippet of the home delivery services we already provide. I think you're absolutely correct that one of the biggest barriers to food security is transportation, and our pantry system is doing their absolute best. But they sometimes operate in hours that aren't convenient for the families who are working two, three jobs and need access to that food. So being able to partner with even more organizations through the amazing grant program that the city just released would be a way we would absolutely be more than willing, as Food Connect, to show up in our local food system here and coordinate more home delivery.
That's just through one of our partnerships. We do a lot of -- so we do numerous food is medicine programs and home delivery through that work with lots of health care systems here in the region, Temple Health, Main Line Health, some CHOP primary care sites in the surrounding suburban counties as well as the CHOP food pharmacy program here in the city, yeah. So we have a lot of capacity to meet the needs through home delivery and do that in a very innovative, creative manner right now to meet the urgent needs, just like we did in the early days of the pandemic.
I can imagine our city folks who are disbursing the money to be connected to -- anyway, it can be done. I want to just talk about the prescription -- what did you call it, pharmacy?
Yeah. What exactly do you designate in that prescription? And would a Sankofa Farms be a place where people would go to get that or do you give choices, these are some places you can go to get this prescription filled basically?
So the produce prescription program is run by the Food Trust and we partnered with them. And so, there's Food Bucks and then Food Bucks RX is the produce prescription program. And those can be redeemed in large part at all of the places where food bucks can be redeemed. So that would be many farmers markets in the region, some corner stores, grocery stores. It's a wide network.
And so, that sort of narrows because it's prescriptive. They have to get those products, right. So that's good to know. And in terms of the Sankofa Farm, Mr. Bolden-Newsome, are you connected to sort of an infrastructure of our urban farms who might be all in a space where if we connected in the right way to create a network where we are connected through maybe Food Trust to spread this at this moment in time, are you part of something like that or are you operating independently in terms of whoever kind of comes and finds you?
No, wouldn't that be difficult. Well, I'm glad you asked. We are connected to several networks. Of course, my colleagues here at The Food Trust. We are a longstanding vendor at The Food Trust and a participant in many of their programs, including the Food Bucks for many years. I don't think that I've gotten any Prescription RX yet, but I do know about the existence of the program as well as -- and I brought a little bit of SWAG about an organization that we belong to called SWAG, which is Southwest and West Agricultural Group. And that's a group, a collection of farmers, city farmers in West and Southwest Philadelphia that come together to go jointly for resources to share information as well as education sessions. And finally, another network here in the city that we're connected to is the Black Farmers Market, which is in conjunction with the Black Farmers Co-Op, that happens on 52nd Street every second and fourth Saturday.
Last question, I know we are waiting to go to public comment and another hearing is supposed to be scheduled here. You mentioned unfamiliarity of people with healthy options, right. What would you from your perspective -- it's a cultural shift, it takes time. But what are some things as we're meeting this crisis, we can put those things into action right now, right. What can we do to start and really amplify exposing people to different options and making these foods more familiar?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think certainly we don't have time to go into all of the details. One of the most important of course is education. You mentioned it's a culture shift. It is a culture shift. It is a culture shift that is addressing previous culture shift in which we moved away from real food. Let's just call it real food, which we moved away from real food to what the expectation is now. And if the reason that our young people find the food nasty -- that's a word we prohibit by the way. We like them to say I don't like it or I like it -- it's because if growing up and you've been addicted to the sweets and the sugary, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald's, of course real food is going to taste strange to you. It is. That's not what you were nourished on. So I think starting and supporting programs that are doing on-the-ground education. We do it through the way that feels most important to me. I am from the Mississippi Delta originally. I thank God I grew up with a deep and connected food culture that I took for granted and even once was embarrassed by. Many of you who are probably from other intact food cultures, immigrant food cultures might be able to sort of relate with that. But I took it for granted and when I came up here and saw that it was such a different story with my Black brothers and sisters here in the North having abandoned their traditional food, they came here with traditional food ways and they lost them or gave them up. I don't know what the story was. I wasn't here. But what I do know is that the approach that we use is to go through we teach folks first, we reacquaint them with their traditional foods, which for many young Philadelphians, and that was a shock to me that they didn't know they had a tradition. Well, what's your traditional food? It's whatever sold at the Chinese restaurant, right, you know. That's not your traditional food. So we go that route. And we do that by working, you know, we have some programs in which we've worked in the past that we worked in schools. We do sort of an education series during the winter with young people. We actually teach them to prepare some versions of their traditional food, give them the history, give them the background and let them eat. And I will tell you this and everybody here has echoed this, what kids help to prepare, they will eat it. I have found that hands down my son is 9 years old. Of course, he doesn't get much of a choice about what to eat. But in general, I know that you can tell the excitement. It's different when Bobby makes the food and puts it out. But if he had anything to do with it, it's the best thing in the world. So education and get them involved and find creative ways to do it. And finally, let's use our churches and our houses of faith as well as centers for this. So the nourishment is not just spiritual, but it's nourishment that comes on deep physical levels as well too. Lots of solutions. I'd love to talk to you about it some other time.
Well, thank you very much. Does anybody else have any questions for our last panel here?
I don't want to belabor the point. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't want to belabor because we do have to get off to public comment. But did you speak -- I was out at a staff meeting. Did you speak at all to Reverend Hubert Brown out of Maryland and what he's doing as it relates to churches and providing food and turning them into places for food markets considering that's where Black folks kind of migrate after on Sundays? Have you heard about this? Has there been any intersection with you?
Absolutely, yeah. Reverend Brown is a great friend of mine and a colleague, Hubert Brown. Reverend Hubert Brown is the director of the Black Church Food Security Network and I think it's based in the Baltimore area, because that's where he's based. But, yeah, that's exactly sort of what I'm talking about. They are doing this ingenious work and they're not waiting for the government to support them. They're doing this ingenious work of organizing what is still one of the most important features of Black life, which is our faith, hands down. And in that they recognize ingeniously that the one sort of guarantee in most Black communities, the one guaranteed space where Black people will own the land and have control of the land, is our churches. And so, they're starting there and they're doing that and they're making sure that every church gets a garden, right. I think that we can support that in ways. I think that there's lots of different avenues. But that's one, yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I thank the panel for your testimony. And now, I guess, Mr. Sham, we are going to go into our public meeting. If you would please announce that.
Yes. We have Liz Hagedorn, John Roesser and Gregory Holston. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Good afternoon. Thank you for your patience. Just in the interest of time, could we limit it to two to three minutes and we only have two so I was going to say two, but let's make it three. And please state your name and proceed with your testimony.
My name is John Roesser. I'm the General Manager of Weaver's Way Co-Op. We operate grocery stores in Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill and Germantown and the seasonal farm market in Roxborough. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak with you. The human impact of the SNAP benefits stoppage is the most critical issue here. We know that. And it's deserving of our foremost attention. But I would like to also express how grocers throughout the country are being harmed, whatever its flaws. SNAP is an efficient way of using our existing food infrastructure to get food into the hands of people in need. Grocers base their inventory purchases, staffing levels and retail spaces around anticipated customer demand in every community throughout the country. That demand is partly based on SNAP purchases and some Philadelphia's neighborhood grocers rely on SNAP customers for more than 50% of their total sales. Most of these grocers are small independent businesses. The longer this crisis lasts, the more likely those grocers may be forced to lay off staff or reduce hours of operation or perhaps go out of business. Anyone who claims that they are pro-business, anyone who claims that they are pro-jobs should be outraged that SNAP benefits have been stopped at Weaver's Way. We have responded to this crisis by leaning into our community ownership model. We have created a cooperative food fund and we have asked our members who can to make modest donations to the fund, donations that will then go to support their fellow members who have been negatively impacted by the federal government shutdown, whether SNAP recipients or otherwise. Since we launched this fund last Thursday, over 1000 of our members have donated just over $125,000 which will allow us to provide food credits to our members in need for at least the next four weeks. And I'm confident if the crisis continues, that our members will continue to step up. We have been touched by the generosity of our fellow Philadelphians and we really do see this as an opportunity for us to come together as a community. Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much. Please state your name and proceed with your testimony. REV. HOLSTON: My name is Reverend Gregory Holston. I am the Executive Director of Just Nation and a part of the Coalition to Defend Democracy. That coalition is made up about 12 different organizations, unions, 13 neighborhood groups. And we've 14 been doing town halls actually 15 before the last election on Project 16 2025 and town halls since. 17 Our last town hall we 18 spent the whole time talking about 19 food stamps basically. The 20 neighborhood and the communities, I know you talked about the lines you saw, but the emotional stress that this is causing our community and our city, the impact of it cannot be measured. There are people right now who are hungry. As a pastor, I've pastored churches where we've done food programs and I knew on a Wednesday night or Sunday morning that if we weren't there with food, they would not eat that day. And that was when we had enough food stamps in the SNAP program. What I've heard from everybody here is that none of the solutions listed here can fill this gap and I want to push back on that. I want to push back on that because I think even the Administration said the payments of SNAP in the city of Philadelphia is about $93 million a month to our nearly 500,000 residents. 2 billion surplus and we have a reserve of $100 million that is available to us. I don't understand when the city says there's nothing we can do when I hear those numbers and I know people are going to be hungry, children are going to die because we're not doing enough. What is a reserve for? I think the Council President said it himself, if this is not a rainy day, what the heck is. Why can't we do what was suggested. Take that 100 million -- and I heard this part earlier today which I thought was an incredible idea -- put it on gift cards, give it to folk, let them go to the grocery store and buy the food like they always bought it so that they can eat and also our economy, as this brother just said, will still prosper. There are stores that have such a small margin that they will close if we don't do something to put money in the hands of people who go there all the time. This is not just a moral issue. This is not just a justice issue. This is plain economics. Not to do this, not to take that $100 million reserve, not to take whatever additional hundreds of millions we have and use it for this, it hurts the city economically. People will lose their jobs. Those supermarkets, those grocery store people, folk who many are formally convicted or formally incarcerated have come home and work in those supermarkets, they're going to lose their job over this. So why is not the outrage here and why aren't we pulling every resource we have to meet the challenge. Now, I know this is city government and it's hard sometimes to actually think really way out of the box. We kind of just go back to the regular stuff we do, but some of y'all got some practice out of thinking out of the box because you had to deal with a pandemic which made you do stuff you never thought you would do before. This is one of those times. We are faced with a man in Washington that is different than anybody else we've ever faced, and it's causing you guys as leaders to have to think completely differently than you ever heard before. I know some financial expert will say to you, well, that's not fiscally responsible. What -- I can't think like that. Cannot think like that. We got too much to lose here. We got too much to lose. We got lives to lose. The last point I must say and go to the economics. 50 back in the in the GP, the gross product of that city. You put 100 million in for one month, you'll get 150 million back through all the stores from everybody who touches a dollar. And even more so for every child you spend a dollar on, for the life of that child, you get $62 back. Not only is it moral, it's right, it's just. Not only is it economical, it makes absolute sense.
And so, I need for y'all to have some courage, thinking out the box, whatever we can do in the faith community and these organizations I represent to be an encouragement to you. I know you have met difficult challenges in the past. You can meet this challenge today by spending the dollars you have now and trusting that you'll get them all back and more because you're investing in our children and in our people. Thank you so much. )
I think that's great too. I do want to add I did see something that was great that the faith-based community did, I think Dr. Jamal Bryant. He told people as opposed to bringing money and tithes to his church, to bring food because it was a moment for everybody across this nation to step up to the plate. I just thought that was obviously -- I think that was a great initiative of the faith-based community that I'd be willing to partner with rather it's the Black clergy, rather it's POWER to do such an initiative and we'll do our part on our end as well to advocate and be bold. And I appreciate you always pushing us to think outside the box and go even harder and do more than what we can do, particularly during this moment in time because everybody deserves to have an opportunity to go to bed with a full belly. Appreciate that very well. REV. HOLSTON: Absolutely. I just want to just remark on that real quick. Giving food is important. I don't want to diminish it, but we have a system set up and putting dollars in the hands of people so they can go to the grocery store and buy the products in that store is the money train. It is the money cycle that happens to keep jobs in our community. And so, I appreciate all the work we're doing when trying to work with those people who push out the food. We got to keep that system going. Because if that system doesn't go, people lose jobs permanently. Stuff shuts down. Commercial corridors shut down because there's no dollar. I pastored on the corner of Germantown and Broad Street and I was a pastor there, and they talked all the time about there's not enough dollars in our community to be able to sustain their businesses. They depend on folk getting food stamps. All the jobs on that commercial corridor depend on people getting food stamps. If they're not getting it, that corridor closes down. And so, I'm just saying y'all got to just think a little broader about this. This is big stuff when you take that much money out of poor neighborhoods each and every month. And the final piece, I just wanted to say again -- I know I got a final piece all the time, but years ago a group that I was a part of called POWER came here and pushed for $10.88 salary for those contracted workers here in the city and was told that couldn't happen.
We did 15. 10 REV. HOLSTON: Then 11 three years ago, we came back and 12 we did 15. And I'm so glad you stood with us on that vote, Councilperson. And we said then that one of the reasons we had to go to 15 is because their salaries have to be higher because food stamps is subsidizing businesses from not paying the salary they're supposed to pay. If they paid what they were supposed to pay, we wouldn't need the food stamps. So I'm pushing you this time on one other part of that, a big jump. Go to $25. Go to every contracted city worker has to have at least $25 an hour. That ripple effect will affect all of these businesses, all of the groups that are fighting for good labor contracts right now, affect all of them so that they won't have to get food stamps in the first place. If you want a long-term solution, pay people a fair wage and you get a long-term solution.
That's right. But listen, thank you. You're echoing what we have been saying about we should not have to do any of this because people should have the agency to drive their own destiny, which means they have a living wage for what they do. But I wanted to point out something that you mentioned, the stress of this time. There's a price you pay in your health outcomes when you have stress like this. We had our physicians panel a little minute ago. That costs us. If you don't care about people's health, okay. But it costs us to have to take care of those health outcomes that happen because of the stress we are putting people under. To have a family or a mother or a father not be able to feed their children is the worst feeling in the world when you're a parent. And I'm saying that this is a moment I hear you, that we need to be creative, think outside the box. We've already talked of ways to connect all the dots, to take out the bureaucracy and just put money in people's hands. I mean, that is the simplest solution instead of going through all these things. And we know how to do it. Our Commissioner just told us she gives gift cards. Just simple, straightforward. While we're doing all these other things and education and information, yes, we should do all of those things. But right now we can solve this immediately with a gift card to those who need it. So thank you all for your testimony. REV. HOLSTON: Thank you.
Thank you to everyone. Do we have any other questions for our public commenters? (No response.)
Thank you again, and I thank everybody for being so patient sitting through this because people who are not here, who are actually hungry are watching us to say what are we going to do, who cares about us. You sitting here is showing that you actually care about someone else. Because most people in here have the ability to feed themselves, but there are people who are watching us, who are listening to say what are we going to do to give a helping hand in a time of crisis. So I appreciate all of you and we are not going to allow this to be normalized. Hunger should not be normalized and we are going to do what we need to do. Fight how we have to fight. Obviously, we have to work across our legislative and executive branch to make sure that we are able to deliver for Philadelphians. But I thank all of you for being here. Stay tuned. We have work to do. And hopefully, we'll be able to come back and give you updates on what how we're going to proceed on things. So with that --
I just want to thank Madam Chair. Can we give her a round of applause -- (Applause.)
-- for stepping up in this space. Dr. Nina Ahmad is the Chair of our Health and Human Services Committee. And so, although we're addressing this issue in this moment in time, she's been on the case, as my mentor Hardy Williams would say, from day one on this particular topic. Also, I just want to acknowledge our Mayor Cherelle Parker and her team. And although I know that we can do more, I still want to acknowledge them for their leadership and still stepping up to the plate and addressing this issue comprehensively, rather it's individuals who are being furloughed, rather it's addressing the food bank, rather it's giving DHS $1 million to put money directly in people's hands. I do thank you all for taking a comprehensive approach and saying here's how we're going to at least stop what we're doing, do an Executive Order within hours to 19 at least get this process moving in 20 the right direction. And as 21 members of Council and the 22 legislative branch, we will examine 23 and look at how we can take it even 24 further as we decide to move forward. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
And thank you to Council President for convening this. This was his bill. This was his bill that we introduced and this is the result of that. So this concludes the business before the Committee on Public Health and Human Services today. Thank you very much for your attendance. Thank you. (Committee on Public Health and Human Services concluded at 3:15 p.m.) C E R T I F I C A T I O N I, hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence noted are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me in the foregoing matter, and that this is a correct transcript of the same. __________________________________ TANEHA CARROLL