When people hear that an anti-violence organization works on hunger, they tend to ask some version of the same question: What does feeding people have to do with stopping violence?
It’s a fair question. It’s also the whole point.
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For as long as we’ve been working in Philadelphia neighborhoods, violence has been the headline. It’s what brings the news van, the press conference, the vigil on the corner. But violence is rarely where the story begins. By the time it reaches a headline, the story is already near its end. The earlier chapters, the ones nobody sees, are quieter.
They’re usually about scarcity: a bare cabinet; a child trying to learn on a loud, empty stomach; a parent running budgets that never add up while the bills always do. They’re forced to make hard choices. Choices no one should have to make. Rent or groceries. The electric bill or dinner.
Hunger isn’t the story. It’s where the story starts.
In one of the most abundant food regions in the country, more than 270,000 Philadelphians don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That’s not a footnote to the city’s other struggles. It’s the soil they grow in.
You can’t understand a city’s hardest outcomes without reckoning with its most basic ones. When you can’t eat, everything is harder. School. Work. Health. Patience. Hope.
Stress builds. Stability? None. The conditions that make violence more likely are often the same conditions that leave families hungry: disinvestment, isolation, and the slow decline of the things a community needs to hold itself together. We’ve learned, often the hard way, that you don’t change those conditions by reacting after the damage is done. You change them upstream, and there’s nowhere further upstream than whether a family can eat.
That connection isn’t just felt. Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities studied Philadelphia families directly through a project called Witnesses to Hunger. The mothers facing the most severe food insecurity were also the most likely to have lived through violence, as survivors and, in some cases, as perpetrators. Hunger and violence feed each other.
The Philadelphia Citizen has reported a similar pattern geographically: Neighborhoods with the least access to healthy food and neighborhoods with the highest rates of gun violence are, more often than not, the same neighborhoods. The connection holds up nationally, too. A 2020 study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management examined what happened in Illinois when SNAP benefits shifted away from the start of the month. Domestic abuse rose 6.9 percent. Assaults rose 23 percent.
The lesson isn’t that food insecurity causes every act of violence. It’s that scarcity isn’t separate from the conditions that make violence more likely. When the pressure on a household increases, so can the risk of harm.
That matters because of how we think about prevention.
Every meal that reliably reaches a family eases pressure: one less stress on a household; a child more focused on their future than a growling stomach; less contention over scarcity and, potentially, more peaceful homes. Steady food access won’t end harm on its own, but it strengthens the foundations that make harm less likely.
Neighborhoods with the least access to healthy food and neighborhoods with the highest rates of gun violence are, more often than not, the same neighborhoods.
So when we show up to talk about food, we’re not talking about an issue that happens to sit next to violence prevention. We’re attacking violence at one of its roots.
That requires us to stop thinking in silos.
Philadelphia’s problems don’t respect org charts. Hunger, violence, health, housing, opportunity — they’re tied together on the same blocks, the same families, often on the same day. A family doesn’t experience these challenges as separate policy categories. Why should the people working to solve them?
We’ve built systems around individual problems: One organization tackles hunger; another tackles violence; another tackles housing; another tackles health. Specialization has its place, but the people living with these challenges don’t get to experience them one at a time.
The work ahead requires something different: relationships that cross those boundaries. Organizers working alongside advocates. Residents alongside institutions. Funders, businesses, government, farmers and community leaders finding ways to coordinate instead of simply operating in parallel.
None of this gets solved in a single day. It’s what gets built from the effort that matters. The relationships that outlast any one conversation. The connections and coordination that turn strangers into lasting partnerships. The shared resolve to keep showing up for one another, week after week.
A crisis won’t get fixed by showing up once. It gets fixed by understanding the conditions underneath it and by solving those problems together.
If you care about this city — its safety, its children, its future — there is work for you in this. We have to be willing to see the connections between the problems we face and act on them.
Safer communities aren’t built by one organization solving one problem. They’re built by people willing to see the full picture and work upstream.
Hunger is where the story starts. How it ends depends on what we do next.
Ericka Gaines is Director of Community Empowerment at the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia.
The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who represent that it is their own work and their own opinion based on true facts that they know firsthand.
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