Located in northwest Philadelphia SHARE provides nutritious food to a network of 550 food cupboards and 250 host organizations each month. SHARE now serves as the lead agency in Philadelphia County for the State Food Purchase Program and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which utilize state and federal funding to provide food each month to food cupboards in Pennsylvania. SHARE also distributes below-retail “packages” of food to host sites in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and metropolitan New York.
In addition to providing food packages and emergency food relief, SHARE has incorporated a community garden at its warehouse and administers Philadelphia’s Farm to Families program. Nice Roots Farm has become an opportunity to include locally-grown, fresh food in SHARE’s food packages and offer residents in the surrounding community increased access to a variety of alternative healthy produce. Nice Roots Farm continues to expand each year and recently added two high tunnels which allow SHARE to produce food for 10 months a year. The garden helps SHARE educate volunteers and community members on the process of growing food. SHARE is currently working with the Philadelphia Horticultural Society to encourage homeowners and host organizations to create their own gardens.
For the past two years, SHARE has also partnered with St. Christopher’s Foundation to administer a new fresh food package program directed at disadvantaged communities in North Philadelphia. The Farm to Families program provides fresh, healthy produce to low-income families each week at a subsidized price. Farm to Families boxes are sold at rates of $10 and $15, each filled with produce that would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive at grocery chains and farmers markets. The program currently serves approximately 500 families each month.