FeedPhilly listened to its community and added medical clinics to its food sites

“Around the Corner” is a PhillyCAM show that offers local social impact leaders the opportunity to share what impact their work is having on the Philadelphia area. 

Nonprofits, want to know how to better serve your community? Ask.

What started in 2012 as Hamza Shaikh and his wife cooking food out of their Center City apartment for a few hungry people they met in their neighborhood has grown into the nonprofit FeedPhilly, which every third Saturday visits 12 sites across the city — as well as in Camden, Chester and Wilmington — to serve meals to about a thousand food insecure people per month.

Shaikh said FeedPhilly was able to grow by “being very consistent and not giving up.” The nonprofit also made a practice of regularly surveying those it serves (and its volunteers) about how it can increase its impact, and adjusts accordingly.

“For example, we did see that there was a need for a medical clinic, so now we work with Temple medical students as well as their podiatry and their optometry students that actually rotate at our sites and go and do screenings,” Shaikh said.

Check out Shaikh’s Around the Corner interview with Generocity Editor Julie Zeglen to learn more about FeedPhilly’s work.

PhillyCAM is Comcast channel 66/966HD/967 and Verizon FIOS channel 29/30 in Philadelphia.