Citizen Cast: Hunger Feeds Violence
Posted by The Philadelphia Citizen on September 1, 2026
If food insecurity directly impacts neighborhood violence, why isn’t fighting hunger part of a comprehensive antiviolence strategy?
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.
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.
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