As the holiday season approaches, community schools are focused on supporting their students and families to ensure that everyone gets a chance to celebrate the season with good company and great food. For Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, we wanted to highlight three of the great partnerships our coordinators have built to support food access in their communities.

Philabundance operates a food backpack program in 3 of the 12 community schools: Cramp Elementary, KHSA, and Gideon School. Once a month, the nonprofit delivers enough food to the schools to send every student home with 5 pounds of nutritious food for their families. So far, Philabundance has given out 13,889 pounds of food – a number that is growing each month.

“Philabundance is supporting our community school priority of improving healthy food access for our families,” said Antonio Romero, community school coordinator for KHSA. “Working with Philabundance has increased our ability to provide healthy food to our students and families, and our students are eating it up!”

The program gives students the opportunity to learn more about healthy food, and promotes family engagement with the school.

“Every third Thursday, Philabundance delivers food for each of our 500+ students,” said William Reed, community school coordinator for Cramp Elementary. “These Thursdays could be a heavy lift for any school, but thanks to the efforts of our amazing team of parent volunteers, we’re able to knock it out in just a few hours. It speaks to our parents’ dedication to the school, as well as to the power of this initiative to remove barriers to learning, such as hunger, so students can come to school ready to learn.”

While access to food is the most critical piece of alleviating food insecurity, knowing how to prepare a healthy meal is an important skill. Through a partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, Eat.Right.Now provides healthy cooking demonstrations to parents and students at many school district schools, including Cramp, Dobbins, Gideon, Tilden, and Logan. The demonstrations include recipes that community members can bring home, and in some of the participating schools the recipes are designed to use the same foods provided by the Philabundance program.  

“Eat.Right.Now and ELECT creates healthy options and tasty recipes, while educating teen parents on the importance of sufficient nutrients, here at Dobbins CTE Community School,” said Charles Reyes, community school coordinator for Dobbins CTE. 

To also make fresh food more available to the communities surrounding Logan and Cramp, The Common Market partners with our schools to host monthly farmer’s markets that are open to the public. The Common Market donates the produce for the school’s first farmer’s market and then encourages the school to use profits from the first sale to buy produce for next month’s farmer’s market, creating a sustainable business model. Parents, community members and students get involved to help set the prices and oversee produce sales.

“First it was the parents, then the kids, and now everyone comes to our fruit and vegetable sale,” said Richard Washington, community school coordinator for Logan Elementary. “We’re able to host a farmer’s market every 3rd Wednesday of the month and families are asking if they can happen more than just once a month. I buy my veggies there too! Our farmer’s market has the best cabbage, apples and greens in the city.”

 

Donate food to one of our schools
Cramp, Gideon, and Logan are currently hosting holiday turkey and can drives. Email education@phila.gov to learn more and find out how to donate.