UPDATE on Partners:
Philadelphia Office
Food deserts are all too common in Philadelphia.
Most often found in cities or rural areas, these are
neighborhoods where people lack access to fresh foods.
In such communities, many residents don’t own cars
and public transportation does not give ready access to
suburban grocery stores or farmers’ markets. Residents
must make do with corner stores that sell heavily
processed or preserved foods, and as a result, suffer
damaging health effects from diseases such as diabetes,
hypertension, obesity, and high blood pressure.
Partners recognized that – although access to fresh food
is unequally distributed throughout the city – access
to congregational building space is not. There are
houses of worship in all neighborhoods. Given this fact,
sacred places are natural hubs for growing, cooking,
distributing, and educating about healthy, nutritious
food.
To take advantage of these space assets, Partners is
breaking new ground by facilitating partnerships
between food justice organizations and congregations
Building raised beds
at SOLID ROCK
umc in the Olney
neighborhood of
Philadelphia, PA.
In addition to a
community garden,
the church is working
with the Philadelphia
Orchard Project to
plant an “edible
forest garden”
of fruit trees and
berry bushes whose
harvest will be used
to supplement the
congregation’s food
distribution program.
7 • Sacred Places • www.sacredplaces.org • Spring 2013
through our Food in Sacred Places program. This
initiative aims to build a coalition of faith communities
and urban nutrition organizations by making use of key
congregational facilities to provide access to fresh, local
food, improve nutrition education, and help people
increase investment in their own communities. In the
case of two of our initial projects, this means turning
unused green space adjoining congregational buildings
into outdoor urban farms and using indoor facilities to
carry out nutrition education and cooking classes.
In West Philadelphia, historic Ward African
Methodist Episcopal Church has been in the Mill
Creek neighborhood for over 100 years. An active
congregation that is surrounded by green space, Ward
had been looking for new ways to reach out to its
neighborhood and address the nutritional challenges
that it sees in its community. Partners connected Ward
with the Urban Tree Connection (UTC), a gardening
and farming nonprofit that has been active in the
local food economy of the Haddington section of