Philly activist delivers healthy foods (and tiny homes!) to locals in need
"Coil Up Your Sleeves and Get To Piece of work"
An update on professor and activist Stephanie Sena, who is still working to uplift Philadelphians in demand of food, shelter and nobility
Jul. 30, 2020
Back in May, Lancaster Subcontract Fresh (LFF), a nonprofit, organic cooperative located in Lancaster, practical for and received a grant from the USDA to create 320 boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables and dairy products for people experiencing nutrient insecurity in Philadelphia. But they needed assistance getting the food where it needed to go.
That'south when they called Stephanie Sena.
Sena, as y'all may remember, is the Villanova professor who, since 2022 has operated the Student-Run Emergency Housing Unit of measurement of Philadelphia, and has proposed a community of tiny homes to assistance alleviate homelessness in the city.
She immediately rose to LFF'southward asking. Every Friday morning at 10am since May fifteen, a huge truck from LFF parks in front of Sena'due south front stoop in Queen Village and unloads the boxes of produce. Her crew of 25-odd volunteers then drive by throughout the day, load up their trunks with 5 to 10 boxes, and deliver 320 boxes of healthy, nutritious nutrient to the doorsteps of people all over Philadelphia.
With her plan to continue the initiative through the end of August, that will translate to 5,120 boxes.
Recognizing and breaking downwardly barriers
Historically, Sena explains, the most common machinery for getting costless food to people who are food-insecure is by having them come up to a central distribution place, like a nutrient bank or a church. Only that structure, despite its best intentions, comes with two main barriers.
The first: transportation, which presents hurdles insofar as price, fourth dimension and access.
Second: the pandemic, which makes taking public transportation a bonafide health take a chance for many. And, she adds, a public nutrient distribution site "serves as a mechanism of public shaming considering… you're making your poverty public." There's as well always the possibility that at that place won't be plenty food. "And that," she says, "is a massive waste product of time and resource."
"My goal was to get the food directly to the doors to the people in need, equally opposed to request people who are hungry to come and look in line," Sena says.
When she kickoff signed on to the initiative, she started by contacting members of City Council to determine which of their constituents were in need of nutrient. She then spread the word on Facebook that she needed drivers—lots of them.
People were responsive. In a affair of two days, she created an efficient system that required no waiting, cost, or health risks. Every calendar week, she loads boxes into her volunteers' trunks with a list of addresses and sends them on their way.
Filling the boxes with nutrients 🥦
The boxes are filled to the brim with salubrious foods—carrots, cucumbers, spinach, kale, lettuce, Swiss chard, apples—with plenty to feed a family of four for a calendar week. "Nutrients are expensive," says Sena, "When you're already vulnerable and economically struggling, information technology'south even more important you accept as many nutrients every bit possible."
Sena knows: She was a recipient of an USDA box dorsum when the city offset went into quarantine. "I raise two children working on an offshoot [professor] salary," she says. Her public speaking gigs were besides hard to come by. "I was hemorrhaging money like a lot of other people," she adds. But the food inside the USDA box was a far cry from the fresh produce of Lancaster Subcontract Fresh.
"The box contained a large tin of meat—similar a can of tuna fish. Likewise a handbag of dried murphy flakes to make into mashed potatoes," she says. "It was inedible. Like infinite food. The fact that the USDA switched from funding these crap boxes to sponsoring local farmers to harvest fresh fruits and vegetables—it's a major shift.".
"Poverty is a robbery"
The impact of her personal experience is largely what inspired her out-of-the-box thinking. "Nosotros demand more creative thinking about how we suspension downwardly barriers," she says. "Having firsthand experience informed how I think about solutions."
Exploring solutions to income inequality, poverty, and food insecurity—circuitous problems that are deeply rooted in unjust and corrupt systems—is at the eye of the work Sena has been doing for years.
She spends her days educating young people nearly these issues at Villanova Law School, in her courses on poverty and policy. She is likewise the recipient of the Anti-Poverty Fellowship at Villanova University, where she engages in research regarding solutions to eradicate poverty, teaches courses in poverty and policy, and generates proposals to fund data-driven analysis of poverty challenges.
And she still runs SREHUP, a nonprofit she helped found every bit a way to engage her students in making a divergence. Since 2011, the organisation has served approximately 400 people in a winter shelter run out of the basement of a church building in Center City.
"Poverty is a robbery. And there are looters who are benefitting from it," Sena says.
It's a phrase—poverty is a robbery—that Sena oftentimes has her students repeat, to emphasize the human relationship between poverty and the people experiencing it.
She wants her students to reprogram how they think about poverty equally a cardinal issue. Poverty isn't "a sad story," equally Sena says, or about "… a white hero who's going to relieve the deplorable people." Poverty is not but something that falls upon unfortunate individuals, and Sena resents when the media frames it as such.
"We need to look at a poverty story as more of an investigation, because it's not just about who is struggling and why," she says. "It's most who is benefitting,"
Some 12 million people across the U.South are categorized as "working-poor," meaning they are employed simply living beneath the national poverty line, co-ordinate to PolicyLink. In Philadelphia, 400,000 people—more than a quarter of the population—live in poverty.
Melissa Monts, who lives in Northeast Philly with her service domestic dog, Ambassador, worked as a Lyft driver, which gave her only enough money to get by. So a car accident gave her an immobilizing dorsum injury, and she can't drive. Instead, she survives on federal disability and SNAP benefits, while applying for loans to buy a auto to showtime driving Lyft again.
Monts, 45, really loves lentil soup—she makes a fresh batch every week that lasts her four to v days. She likes to garnish her soup with fresh vegetables, but her access to practiced produce had been virtually nonexistent for months—until she started getting Sena'south weekly delivery boxes. At present, her volunteer commuter even adds fresh mint from her own garden every week to the delivery.
Sena recognizes this isn't, and shouldn't be, the long-term programme. "There are things that are needed in an emergency that lower the access barriers," says Sena. "Giving out boxes is 1 tool in the toolbox when it comes to fighting for economical justice. It's important, information technology's necessary—but it's not the solution," she notes.
A hamlet of tiny houses
While another USDA grant to LFF is not guaranteed beyond August, Sena says she's determined to find another food supplier and go far piece of work; she'due south already received an offer from a local business owner to operate out of their storefront.
That same spirit also guides Sena's connected work to pave the way for a village of tiny houses on a 1- to i.v-acre lot, grounded in the thought that community is what people experiencing housing insecurity really need to thrive and go upwardly mobile, in addition to affordable housing.
Task training, social resources, fifty-fifty a community garden are all office of this innovative housing solution that has begun to pop up across the country in cities like Nashville, Dallas and Seattle. And the homes are really nice, too.
Prior to the pandemic, Sena says that the plan was always to move frontward with the tiny homes initiative, simply current zoning laws arrive hard to legally operate tiny homes on Philadelphia land.
In a sign of promise, during their last Zoom session earlier summer intermission City Council passed a resolution accepting almost $9 million from the federal government to be used towards housing solutions. While Sena says that all of this money isn't necessarily going towards a tiny home initiative, or SREHUP, it'southward a hopeful sign: "The people that create the laws are maxim that we feel this is necessary. The Urban center is making a promise that obstacles volition be overcome," she says.
To further this momentum, last week Sena took a field trip with several Councilmembers to the tiny homes manufacturing constitute in Lancaster County to show them half-dozen finished houses, meet the builders and "collectively figure out how nosotros tin can bring this to Philadelphia," says Sena.
There was too a funder present who offered $2 one thousand thousand to assist build the houses. While no one made whatever commitments, in that location was a palpable sense of urgency and bulldoze to farther explore the option.
Sena is working with Metropolis Council and the head of Licensing and Inspections to adopt amendments to the International Residential Code (IRC) to allow for the building of tiny homes in Philadelphia.
She'due south also working with Dan Fitzpatrick, the president of the Tiny Home Manufacture Association, which works with cities beyond the country to amend their building codes for this very reason. While "it's the nitty gritty stuff," as Sena says, it's essential work to keep tiny homes moving in the right direction.
"Every time we hitting a wall, nosotros go effectually it or interruption through information technology," said Councilmember Marker Squilla in a Facebook Live outcome streamed from the manufacturing site. "We're not going to stop until we accept something that works. Information technology's not how, but when."
For now, equally the pandemic rages on and stability is a given for no 1, Sena and her team of defended volunteers will continue to serve neighbors in demand with the fruits, vegetables, and respect they deserve.
"We even so take work to practise in getting people to care most their neighbors," says Sena. "Each one of us is in some mode struggling—one antidote to that is to roll up your sleeves and get to piece of work," she continues. "This does feed hungry people, but it also feeds hungry souls."
Want more than? Check out these stories about other locals fighting food insecurity during the pandemic—and maybe reach out to meet if they need volunteers.
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/stephanie-sena-food-boxes-tiny-homes/
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