A local agency that provides nutritional meals to people with life-threatening illnesses is scrambling to fill a gap after it lost all city funding for one of its program.
The Philadelphia Department of Human Services cut $350,000 from Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutritional Alliance’s Children’s Meal Program.
The DHS funding was the initiative’s only financial backing. MANNA CEO Sue Daugherty said the DHS funding has supported the program for more than 15 years.
The Children’s Meal Program provides daily meals for about 150 youth annually. A handful of the children are the primary MANNA clients who themselves are ill, but the majority, Daugherty said, are dependent children who live in the household with a MANNA client.
“We learned a long time ago that, if you don’t provide meals for the whole household, the client is not going to get the proper nourishment, because as parents, they’re going to take care of their kids first,” Daugherty said.
MANNA was founded to provide meals to people with HIV/AIDS but has since expanded its mission to meet the needs of those battling an array of illnesses. Nearly all of their clients, Daugherty said, live in poverty.
“We don’t have financial criteria, but 95 percent of our clients live below the poverty line,” she said. “Most of the time, they lack support systems, so we may have a single mom taking care of the kids as well as herself.”
Daugherty said DHS Acting Commissioner Jessica Shapiro reached out to her this spring to give her warning that the department’s financial situation could impact the program’s funding.
“She shared with me that last year they had 14,000 child sex-abuse cases and this year it was 20,000. They’re struggling and they’re getting their funding from the state cut each year,” Daugherty said, noting that Shapiro explained the agency has had to divert funding from its prevention program, which the Children’s Meal Program was funded through, to direct services. “We were planning to take a hit but were a little shocked to be completely defunded; but I do appreciate that we had somewhat of a heads-up.”
Daugherty said DHS officials offered to make introductions at the Department of Health in case that department could help MANNA close the funding gap in the future.
She said the organization is tapping into its reserved resources to keep the Children’s Meal Program up and running. They’re also undertaking active fundraising efforts to help sustain the program until new funding sources can be located.
NRG Energy announced this week it was donating $20,000 to the Children’s Meal Program.
Apart from donating money, Daugherty said supporters can also donate time to the organization.
“We’re a volunteer-driven organization, which is why we’re able to afford to serve as many people as we do, and the summer is always challenging for getting volunteers, so volunteering is a great way to help out,” Daugherty said.
For more information, visit www.mannapa.org.
