January 20, 2025
Courtenay Harris Bond/PhillyVoice
People line up in for hot meals, clothing and harm reduction supplies offered by The Everywhere Project, an outreach group in Philly, each Wednesday in LOVE Park. Volunteers then take leftover food and supplies to people living on the streets in Kensington – mobile services that a City Council bill would limit.
Thomas Frey turned his white box truck onto a side street in Kensington at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday.
"What's up, what's up? Anyone need food?" he called out from his cracked window to people huddled near a building on the 22-degree night.
Frey, operations director for the harm reduction and outreach group The Everywhere Project, pulled over and lifted the truck's sliding door. He then grabbed one of the thermal containers full of hot meals that volunteers had boxed up after serving people at the group's outreach in LOVE Park earlier that evening.
Frey joined Jen Shinefeld, an epidemiologist who co-founded The Everywhere Project, and a volunteer in handing out containers of seafood spaghetti and rice and beans with sausage. They also gave out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bags of pretzels and bottles of water to the growing crowd.
Several people asked for blankets. Frey handed out the last few. Standing by the trunk of her Subaru station wagon, Shinefeld helped people to donated coats that fit them — and ones they liked — and offered "warming bags" that contained socks, gloves, hats, mylar blankets and hand warmers.
One man smiled as he eased a new pair of gloves onto his swollen hands. He said he had burned his right hand, holding it over one of the open fires that unsheltered people sometimes light to try to keep warm.
"Can I get a Wawa sandwich?" someone asked.
"No," said Frey, holding a box full of donated ones. "But I'll give you two!"
His laugh boomed into the cold.
Another man thanked Frey for being out there and lingered until the crowd dispersed. Then he helped bag up garbage that Frey hauled off into the dark.
The city estimates that about 675 people – many of whom have substance use disorders – live on the streets in Kensington, a neighborhood that contains the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast.
The Everywhere Project, which started in 2021, is one of the nonprofit and grassroots organizations that provide food, clothing, toiletries, wound care treatments, overdose reversal medications and links to social services to unsheltered people from vehicles that move to where people gather.
These services, known as mobile outreach, also are provided throughout the city, including Kensington, by groups like Operation in My Backyard, Project HOME, Savage Sisters, Prevention Point Philadelphia, SOL Collective and Angels in Motion.
People who do this work, mostly as volunteers, say they are reaching a population that has a hard time accessing medical care and other essential services.
But others argue that these services contribute to "litter" and "nuisance behavior" and pose "safety concerns that have adversely affected nearby residents" — as a bill introduced in City Council last fall by Councilmember Quetcy Lozada states.
The legislation, approved by a committee in December, would prevent mobile service providers from operating on residential blocks and within 50 feet of schools and recreation centers in the Seventh Councilmanic District, which includes Kensington. Providers also would be barred from operating within 100 feet of one another. Violators could be fined.
Lozada, a Democrat who represents the Seventh District, drafted the legislation "to improve the relationship between providers and the community, enhance the quality of life of residents, and protect children," her staff wrote in an email.
The bill notes that people who live in areas where mobile services are provided have seen an "accumulation of plastic waste, toxic waste, human waste, discarded drug paraphernalia, discarded pills, medical supplies and various other items," and also "increased social conflict" with some mobile services recipients who have engaged in "nuisance and criminal activity" on residents' porches, front steps and backyards.
Outreach workers have said impeding mobile services will leave people who are unsheltered out in the cold, exacerbating public health issues in the city. Many people who are unsheltered have mental health disorders or substance use disorders – or both. Those with substance use disorders may not yet be ready or able to go into treatment for drug use.
The proposed legislation falls in step with Mayor Cherelle Parker's law-and-order approach to Kensington. The city began encampment sweeps on Kensington Avenue last spring, deployed 75 new police recruits to patrol the neighborhood, and is setting up a neighborhood court to fast-track people picked up for drug use to treatment or jail. Parker pulled nearly $1 million from Prevention Point's syringe exchange against warnings from public health experts that the move would increase the spread of HIV and other diseases.
The Parker administration also has opened a large recovery housing complex near the city's prison in Holmesburg, launched a new mental health walk-in clinic in North Philadelphia and started a shelter and behavioral health treatment facility in Fairmount.
But mobile services in Kensington are a critical part of the city's public health network because they "create entry points for a greater level of care and engagement" for people who are having trouble accessing brick-and-mortar sites, said Shinefeld, who has done more than a decade of behavioral health research and for several years ran a citywide drug checking program to monitor the makeup of the illicit drug supply in Philadelphia.
Mobile services are "life-sustaining services, not only in the tangible supplies and things that are provided in terms of safer use, food, water, wound care, but also in terms of the human connection that is provided," Shinefeld said.
Mobile service teams give people "hope" to help keep them going, Shinefeld said.
"People don't disappear because services disappear," Shinefeld said. "All it does is make the circumstances harder for people, and you're increasing the vulnerability of people because you're taking away resources."
A spokesperson from Lozada's office said Wednesday that Lozada and her staff recently held a "roundtable" with members of the medical community to get more input about the mobile services legislation. They plan to host a second session with other stakeholders, and the bill's wording could change, he said.
"The meeting was very positive," Lozada's staff wrote in an email. "Meetings like this should not be a rare occurrence, everybody needs to be on the same page for this to work. As we proceed with this bill and our work in Kensington, they will continue to be part of conversations and the legislative process."
In the meantime, groups like The Everywhere Project continue their mobile outreach in Kensington and throughout the city.
"We are a response to a problem," said Shannon Ashe, a social worker who co-founded The Everywhere Project. "Until that need no longer exists, we will be here."
