PHILADELPHIA -- If your family were immigrants newly arrived to Philadelphia from Latin America, you might be focused on any number of things: finding a job, getting your children into school, learning a new language, or paying off debts from a long, arduous journey. But then, something both more basic and urgent comes to mind: How can you afford groceries, and where would you get them?

Two local community organizations have partnered together to ease the weight of those questions. This month, Old Pine Community Center and Puentes de Salud, a nonprofit promoting health and wellness for Philly’s Latino immigrant population, celebrated the fourth anniversary of their partnership to deliver free groceries to immigrant families in Philadelphia.

Focusing primarily on South and Southwest Philly, the two organizations identify families in need of assistance, organize and package food donated by Philabundance, Sharing Excess and individuals, and hand deliver the bags of groceries to families every Sunday. On average, the partnership serves 110 to 120 families a week.

“It’s a huge support for people to be able to use their resources on other necessities. For some people, it plays that role where, truly, they wouldn’t have any food if they weren’t receiving this,” said Olivia Pandolfi, food access coordinator with Puentes.

Innovation by necessity

The partnership began shortly after the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Many of the people served by Puentes have jobs in the restaurant industry or other work in the informal economy that was hit first and hardest when the world shut down. When Puentes asked its families what help they needed, people mostly asked for food support.

Meanwhile, Old Pine Community Center had a preexisting program that offered free, in-person meals on the weekends that was shuttered because of COVID. But Old Pine’s staff and volunteers still wanted to help community members in need of food, and got in touch with Puentes. Mark Atwood, the executive director of Old Pine Community Center, said the free groceries program also gave their staff and volunteers a reason to stay connected during a particularly lonely, isolating time.

“They’re a part of this bigger thing ... there’s all of us that are working on this same thing together,” he said.

“These folks that we’re working with are dealing with other challenges in their life, and [the partnership] is really just trying to make food easy and [have] as few barriers as possible.”

Now, the partnership serves double the number of families it did in March 2020, and distributes 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of nonperishable food items a week. The offerings also include fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as meat and dairy depending on donation availability. Since the start of the program, Old Pine and Puentes have delivered more than 14,000 bags of groceries.

The deliveries are customized to fit each family’s particular adult-to-child ratio, dietary restriction, likes and dislikes, and even diaper size (when the organizations can source relevant household items such as diapers, socks and toothbrushes, they are included, as well). All of the families in the program come from Puentes referrals, and typically are people who have some barrier that would keep them from visiting Puentes’ food pantry easily, such as being single-parent households that need child care, the elderly or people with disabilities.

Many of those whom Puentes works with are recent immigrants, and those families are also often invited into the program while they get acclimated.

“Since we started [this partnership] as an emergency response program, it’s really transitioned over time into a key part of our clinical offerings. It uncovered the insecurity that was already in the community. So it wasn’t because of COVID necessarily that all of these families suddenly became food insecure,” Pandolfi said.

“It just revealed to the Puentes team — this is really a huge part of people’s well-being. It’s a need that’s not getting met.”

On March 15, Old Pine hosted a dinner for staff and volunteers from both organizations who have worked on the program, to celebrate the partnership’s fourth anniversary. Both Atwood and Pandolfi said that they hope their work can continue to expand. They’d like to be able to buy such staples as milk and eggs, which are not shelf-stable and typically absent from donations; bring on a partner to donate diapers so they can become a regular part of deliveries for families who need them; and, eventually, work with a greater number of families across the city each week.

“We’re not filling everyone’s entire pantry,” Atwood said, “but it’s really just alleviating at least some burden for them.”

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