Philadelphia Food Services Played Part in Protecting the City from Poverty During COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Yaelies Terron
April 12, 2021
States, like Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, and Alabama, have been ranked as the lowest in protecting children from hunger and poverty during the COVID-19 Pandemic, but Philadelphia managed to open up more than 103 Food Distribution locations from different programs to protect families, children, and individuals from suffering the same problems. Places such as schools, churches, parks, and recreation centers were open for food distribution.
Amy Virus from the Philadelphia Food Service team worked with the City of Philadelphia along with her colleagues to open up locations across the city when the pandemic first started in early 2020.
She says that when they first closed about a year ago, they quickly coordinated with the city of Philadelphia to identify locations, that would be open for meal distribution to the students. As time went on, they were able to open up 103 distribution sites.
Amy also speaks about the impact that the Food Program had on her team during the pandemic, while there were still limitations.
“We feel it's been really positive,” Amy Virus said. “Our program has evolved, it's evolved because we are trying to reach as many people as we can. So we are trying to have the biggest impact on our students within our limitations.”
Elizabeth Reegan, who also works for the Philadelphia Food Services saw firsthand the impact of the food program. She was motivated to keep on doing what she was doing because she saw the benefits from it.
“One of our families that came to one of our meal sites, the parents, brung pictures of their kids because they wanted to show all the staff that these were all their kids that were getting the food and they really appreciated what we're doing,” Elizabeth said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic was new territory, the Food Services team faced many challenges while trying to do their best in giving the students good and clean food.
“So what I think has been the hardest is to really figure out what is our end goal? When will the students be back at school?” Amy said, “But we also had some refrigeration issues because we don't have freezers in all of our schools, so we needed to actually buy freezers which took a number of weeks.”
Amy’s advice for other food programs trying to serve families is to communicate and rely on the community.
“I would say it's important to coordinate as we did in Philadelphia to bring everybody together so families had a one-stop place to look for information about where to find food,” Amy said. “I think that it is really important in helping people understand where to go. So I think the first thing is just making sure that the schools are mobilized and are providing for families and then getting that information out.”
Even though there were many challenges that Amy and the Food Distribution team had, she is still very appreciative of what they have accomplished and how they did it.
“So we had to figure all of that out pretty quickly during the pandemic, but our staff again were amazing. They worked with us, they came to work,” says Amy, “They showed up for their students and we've figured out how to feed them, and the boxes really helped to make sure that we had all of the components that they needed inside that box so they could just have a one-stop-shop and they only needed to come once a week.”
For more information about continuing meal distribution, visit the Food Services page of the School District of Philadelphia's website.