For a long time, BIPOC community leaders have been excluded from decisions about their own communities. When they have been included they are often tokenized or uncompensated. This report recognizes that lived experience is a form of expertise, and shares steps for valuing, incorporating, and uplifting that expertise by way of co-creation.
This report aims to provide a framework for working with community partners and members with lived experience to design racially-equitable, sustainable, and community-based food access solutions.
The Meet the Need Coalition is a group of current and former TANF participants and advocacy organizations in Pennsylvania. We are working to improve the TANF program and increase the TANF grant amount. The effort is spearheaded by Community Legal Services, Pennsylvania Health Access Network, Black Women’s Policy Agenda, and Just Harvest.
Authored by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, this report is the result of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council’s (PFPC) year-long partnership with Harvard and Pittsburgh Public Schools to better understand the challenges faced by schools in our city, to identify best food policies and practices in Pittsburgh and comparable cities, and to highlight recommendations for future work. 
New data released by the Census Bureau on September 17th show that poverty remains stubbornly high. In Pennsylvania, 13.6 percent of people were poor in 2014 – roughly the same as in 2013 when 13.7 percent were poor. The child poverty rate also remains stuck, with 19.4 percent of Pennsylvania children living in poverty in 2014 – the same as in 2013 when 19.4 percent of our children were poor. Disappointingly, our country’s economic recovery is hardly reaching Pennsylvania’s poor, and progress remains slow. 
