Over the course of three days, I met with 13 congressional legislators or their staffers, spoke to representatives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the White House, as well as fellow farmers, to discuss a very real threat impacting our nation: the instability of our food system.
Across the United States, food system organizations — from regenerative farms and gleaning networks, to food access nonprofits and community grocers — are all under immense pressure because of federal funding cuts, rising tariffs, and labor shortages. The entire food chain is strained, and the effects are compounding.
Recently, during the government shutdown, families across the country were not receiving SNAP benefits. American farms and families are still struggling and need relief now.
Farmers suffer even as food prices rise
While food prices continue to rise, farmers make less than 16 cents on every food dollar spent, according to the National Farmers Union. Even worse, there has been a severe labor shortage because of outdated agricultural workforce policies, while large corporate farms are making record profits.
Suicide among farmers is at an all-time high, and the sixth highest among all occupational groups. As the largest Black food grower in Pennsylvania, I am seeing these challenges each and every day.
In addition to the impact this will have on our children and our most vulnerable communities, the killing of this program is having a direct impact on small and first-generation farmers like me. My produce farm lost upwards of $150,000 between contracts with local food banks that were supported by the LFPA Program and the loss of the Agriculture Department’s Climate Smart Partnerships.
These drastic cuts have strained our operations and have impacted our ability to promptly pay our workers and ensure our communities have access to food that is not only locally and regeneratively grown, but also 100% chemical-free.
Food anchors social drivers
At the heart of this challenge is a simple truth: Food is the anchor to all social drivers of health. When food is unstable, so is health, education, safety, economic opportunity, and environmental well-being.
This is evident in North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, which is plagued by an opioid epidemic, crime, food apartheid, and nutrition insecurity.
A corner store in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. Such stores should be part of the local food system, writes Christa Barfield.
According to a 2019 report released by the city of Philadelphia and Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, Upper Kensington ranked last out of 46 Philadelphia neighborhoods in terms of health factors and health outcomes.
Addressing food access through a regenerative and localized lens is not just a response — it is a long-term strategy for national security.
In my September conversations with members of Congress, it became abundantly clear that an updated Farm Bill would not be passed into law by the Sept. 30 deadline. And it wasn’t.
Due to this failure to prioritize the needs of small family farmers, we must now turn inward and rely on our communities to design and implement a scalable, regionally coordinated food system.
This is possible by supporting local farmers and workers through fair, reliable markets, reducing food waste via efficient, community-based recovery, and empowering neighborhoods with increased food sovereignty and local ownership.
I founded FarmerJawn Agriculture seven years ago, and I know that for a community or nation to be healthy, it must be well-fed. Food is medicine. Good food means good health.
Despite the challenges we face, this idea is more relevant now than ever. I am eager to launch CornerJawn, a farm-to-store operation that will reimagine the corner store as a preventative healthcare hub.
CornerJawn will increase access to fresh and nutrient-dense food that is both convenient and affordable through a dignified pricing model.
It will enhance urban living for the strategically forgotten communities that are now seeing record development in hopes of creating, what? Wealth? True wealth is measured in longer lives with beautified communities and healthier families.
We must treat food like medicine, invest in those specialty farms that feed us, and watch our country thrive.
Remember: Agriculture is the Culture.
Christa Barfield, a.k.a. FarmerJawn, is a healthcare professional turned regenerative farmer, an entrepreneur, an advocate for food justice, and a James Beard Award winner. As the founder of FarmerJawn Agriculture, she manages 128 acres across three counties in Pennsylvania, making her the largest Black food grower in the state.
Temple University Health System reported a $15 million operating loss in the three months that ended Sept. 30.
The result for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 was an improvement from the North Philadelphia nonprofit’s $17 million loss last year.
“We’re pretty happy where we are,” CEO Mike Young said Wednesday. Revenue was above budget and labor costs were on budget in the first quarter for the first time in several years.
Here are some details:
Revenue: Total revenue was $800 million, up 13% from $712.5 million a year ago. Outpatient revenue increased by nearly $62 million, much of it from the health system’s specialty and retail pharmacy business.
Temple participates in a federal program for safety-net hospitals that allows it to buy certain drugs at a discount and then get full reimbursement from insurance companies.
Expenses: Temple noted in its report to municipal bond investors Tuesday that salaries, including higher pay rates for nurses, and higher drug spending for outpatient infusions and other pharmacy business were the biggest expense increases.
Notable: On the labor front, several job categories remain hard to fill, Young said. Those are CT techs, nurse anesthetists, and lab techs. “Other than those three [specialties], it’s not where it was three years ago, where you couldn’t find anybody,” he said.
Art matters. And because it does, artists and art institutions have been targets of authoritarian regimes from Red Square to Tiananmen Square. Black Lives Matter Plaza, located near the White House, was removed in March. That same month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution and interpretive signs at National Park Service sites, including the President’s House.
Paul Robeson, athlete, singer, actor, and human rights activist, lived his final years in West Philadelphia. At a protest rally in London in 1937, Robeson said: “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
With democracy nowunder assault, “Fall of Freedom,” a national artist-led protest, hasissued a call for creative resistance, of actions against authoritarian control and censorship, to take place in venues nationwide beginning Friday.
“Fall of Freedom is an urgent reminder that our stories and our art are not luxuries, but essential tools of resistance,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage wrote in a statement. “When we gather in theaters and public spaces, we are affirming our humanity and our right to imagine a more just future.”
Creative resistance is as American as apple pie, and this city is, after all, the birthplace of our democracy.
The political cartoon “Join, or Die,” published in 1754 in the Pennsylvania Gazette, became a symbol of the American Revolution and stoked public opinion against Britain.
During his tenure as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Benjamin Franklin helped distribute Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion “Am I Not a Man and a Brother.” In a letter to Wedgwood, Franklin wrote, “I am persuaded [the medallion] may have an Effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet in procuring favour to those oppressed people.”
Wedgewood medallion with the words “Am I not a man and a brother” in relief along the edge, ca. 1780s, from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum’s education materials on the medallion stipulate that it was “modeled by William Hackwood and fabricated by Josiah Wedgwood in England in 1787 for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, this medallion functioned as a potent political emblem for promoting the abolition of slavery. It reached the United States in 1788, when Wedgwood sent a batch to Philadelphia for former enslaver and ‘cautious abolitionist’ Benjamin Franklin to distribute.”
And indeed it did. Wedgwood’s engraving became the iconic image of the anti-slavery movement. It was printed on broadsides, snuffboxes, decorative objects, and household items. Abolitionist art was part of domestic life in Philadelphia.
The American Anti-Slavery Society, whose founding members included Philadelphians James Forten, Lucretia Mott, and Robert Purvis, commissioned a copper token featuring a related “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister” design. Proceeds from the sale of the token were used to fund the abolition movement.
Abolitionists used art to create a visual language of freedom. Artists created illustrations and paintings that showed “how bad slavery was.” There were theatrical performances and public readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling novel of the 19th century.
Robert Douglass Jr. studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is considered Philadelphia’s first African American photographer. Active with the National Colored Conventions movement, Douglass created a counternarrative to derogatory racial stereotypes. His daguerreotype of Francis “Frank” Johnson, a forefather of jazz, is in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
On the heels of the Jazz Age, a group of religious activists formed the Young People’s Interracial Fellowship in North Philadelphia in 1931. The fellowship brought together Black and white congregations for dialogue, cultural exchange, and joint activism.
A 1944 seder at Fellowship House.
In 1941, the organization evolved into Fellowship House, whose mission was to resist racial discrimination through education, cultural programs, and community organizing.
Notable cultural figures who spoke at Fellowship House include Marian Anderson, Dave Brubeck, and Robeson. In April 1945, seven months before the release of the short film The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra, the film’s star, stopped by Fellowship House to speak about the importance of racial tolerance. He told the young people that “disunity only helps the enemy.”
The film’s title song, an anti-racism patriotic anthem, became one of Sinatra’s signature songs.
Abel Meeropol, an educator, poet, and songwriter, composed both the film’s title song, “The House I Live In,” and the anti-lynching poem and song, “Strange Fruit,” which would become inextricably associated with one of Philadelphia’s jazz greats.
Born on April 7, 1915, at Philadelphia General Hospital in West Philly, Billie Holiday, née Eleanora Fagan, is one of the greatest jazz singers of all time.
No artist has met the moment with more courage than Lady Day, whose 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” was named song of the century by Time magazine in 1999, and was added to the National Recording Registry in 2002.
“Strange Fruit” is a timeless and empowering act of creative resistance.
While Holiday is sui generis, jazz musicians were the vanguard of the civil rights movement.
At so-called black and tan clubs like the Down Beat and the Blue Note, Black and white people intermingled on an equal basis for the first time.
Billie Holiday leaving City Hall in 1956 after her release following a drug bust. Police Capt. Clarence Ferguson walks behind her.
Jazz clubs were constantly harassed by Philadelphia police led by vice squad Capt. Clarence Ferguson and his protégé, Inspector Frank Rizzo. The nightspots became battlegrounds in the struggle for racial justice. Jazz musicians’ unbowed demeanor fashioned a new racial identity.
In remarks to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. riffed on the importance of jazz and the jazz culture. He observed: “It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.”
“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music,” he added. “It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.”
At a time when our constitutional rights are being trampled and American history is being whitewashed, I am answering “Fall of Freedom’s” call — as a cultural worker and as a Philadelphian.
Under the “Fall of Freedom” banner, and in collaboration with Scribe Video Center, I will lead a walking tour of Holiday’s Philadelphia.
We will trace her footsteps through Center City and South Philly. We will visit the clubs where she sang, the hotels where she stayed, and the site of the jazz club immortalized in the Tony Award–winning play Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Along the way, we will also highlight places connected to Robeson.
Courage is contagious. When we gather on South Broad, we are the resistance.
Faye Anderson is the founder and director of All That Philly Jazz, a place-based public history project. She can be contacted at phillyjazzapp@gmail.com.
A former West Philadelphia ward leader and onetime staffer for State Sen. Vincent Hughes was sentenced Wednesday to one year in federal prison for stealing more than $140,000 from his ward and a church where he served as a deacon.
Willie Jordan, 68, had pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud over the summer. During his sentencing hearing Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, Jordan said that he was sorry and that there were no excuses for his misconduct.
“It was a bad decision,” Jordan said. “It was just wrong.”
Bartle agreed, telling Jordan that although he appeared to have lived an otherwise noble life — dedicating his time and career to serving the public — stealing from institutions that sought to help people was inexcusable.
“What’s so disappointing is you had a position of trust … and you abused that position of trust,” Bartle said. “And the amount of money you took were not insignificant sums.”
Jordan for years was the unpaid leader of the 44th Ward in West Philadelphia and also a deacon at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in North Philadelphia. Prosecutors said that he had near-total control over the finances of both organizations, and that from 2020 to 2024 he took advantage of that status by writing checks to himself to cover personal expenses, including credit card and utility bills, purchases from airlines and furniture stores, and costs associated with a relative’s funeral.
In all, prosecutors said, he stole more than $57,000 from the church and $85,000 from the ward, and often claimed the money was to reimburse the organizations for expenses they never incurred. To further conceal his wrongdoing, prosecutors said, he sometimes wrote false entries on checks’ memo lines, saying they were to pay for items such as Easter baskets or summer youth programs.
Much of the fraud occurred while Jordan was working in Hughes’ office, prosecutors said, where he was a longtime top aide and had a six-figure state salary.
Jordan’s attorney, Sam Stretton, said that Jordan retired from that job earlier this year amid the federal investigation into his crimes, and that he also is no longer a ward leader.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Lappen said in court that the repeated nature of Jordan’s wrongdoing, and his status as a well-paid public employee, made his crimes stand out.
“He’s somebody who should have known better,” Lappen said.
Stretton said Jordan “made a terrible mistake but is an otherwise good person.” He said Jordan has already repaid the $57,000 he stole from the church and is continuing to donate hundreds of dollars per month to help cover its bills and other expenses. Jordan also is continuing to make restitution payments to the ward, Stretton said.
Several of Jordan’s relatives wept in the courtroom after Bartle imposed his sentence. The judge then paused and addressed Jordan again before adjourning the hearing.
“You’re going to have to pay the price of your crimes, but there is life after prison, and I hope you will continue to be a useful and productive citizen,” Bartle said. “There is redemption.”
Angelica Javier was sitting at home on a Saturday evening last month when her son’s uncle called in a panic.
Xzavier, her 16-year-old, had been shot, he said — one of the teen’s friends had called and told him, but he knew nothing else.
Javier, 32, frantically checked a news website and saw a brief story mentioning that a man was shot and killed in Northeast Philadelphia.
That could not be her son, she told herself. Xzavier was only a boy, she said — tall but lanky, with the splotchy beginnings of a mustache just appearing on his upper lip.
She called around to hospitals without success. Xzavier’s father, Cesar Gregory, drove to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, desperate for information.
Then, just before 10 p.m., she said, a homicide detective called to say their eldest child, their only son, had been shot and killed that afternoon near Teesdale and Frontenac Streets.
Angelica Javier (left) and her 16-year-old son, Xzavier Gregory, getting tacos after watching the Eagles beat the Los Angeles Rams earlier this year.
The shooting, police said, stemmed from a dispute among teens at the Jardel Recreation Center, just blocks away, earlier in the week. Xzavier’s parents said the detective told them that one of their son’s friends may have slapped a young woman that day.
On Oct. 11, they said, police told them that Xzavier and his friends stopped by the young woman’s house shortly before 4 p.m. to talk with her, apologize, and resolve the conflict. They shook hands, the parents said, and started to walk away.
Then, police said, the girl’s 17-year-old boyfriend, Sahhir Mouzon, suddenly came out of the house with a gun and started shooting down the block at them. Someone shot back, police said, but it was not Xzavier. In total, 45 bullets were fired.
An 18-year-old woman walking by the teens was wounded in the leg.
Xzavier was struck in the chest and died within minutes.
Mouzon has been charged with murder and related crimes.
Javier and Gregory have been left to navigate life without their “Zay” and to reckon with a loss that comes even as gun violence in the city reaches new lows — but which still persists among young people and brings pain to each family it touches.
They don’t understand how a 17-year-old had a gun, they said, or why a seemingly minor — and potentially resolved — conflict had to escalate.
But mostly, they said, they want Philadelphia to know and remember their child: a goofy junior at Northeast High. An avid Eagles fan. A lover of Marvel movies and spicy foods.
Xzavier Gregory was born in Philadelphia. His parents loved his chubby cheeks.Xzavier Gregory was born Sept. 20, 2009, to Angelica Javier and Cesar Gregory.
Xzavier Giovanni Gregory was born Sept. 20, 2009, at Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia. His parents, just teens at the time, were immediately taken by his chubby cheeks, which he kept until his teenaged years.
He lived in Kensington until he was about 10 years old, his mother said, when they moved to the Northeast. He attended Louis H. Farrell School, then spent his freshman year at Father Judge High before moving to Northeast High.
He loved traveling, and often visited family in Florida and the Dominican Republic, attended football camps in Georgia and Maryland, and tagged along on weekends to New York with his mother as part of her job managing federal after-school programs.
He played football for the Rhawnhurst Raiders, typically as an offensive or defensive lineman, and had a natural skill for boxing, his parents said.
Philadelphia sports were in his blood — particularly the Eagles. DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown, his father said, were his favorite players. (Before his death, he agreed that Brown should be included in more plays this year, Gregory said.)
Some of Gregory’s favorite memories with his son revolve around the Eagles. Sitting front row at the Linc on his 13th birthday. Erupting in cheers as the team won its first Super Bowl in 2018. Embracing in tears when they won a second this year.
Cesar Gregory (left) and son Xzavier at the Eagles Super Bowl parade near the Art Museum in February. It is a day with his son that the father said he will never forget.
Xzavier was the oldest of three children. His sisters are still too young too fully understand what happened, the parents said.
“He went to heaven,” Javier told 7-year-old Kennedy.
The number of kids shot peaked in 2021 and 2022, when violence citywide reached record highs and guns became the leading cause of death among American children. So far this year, 105 kids under 18 have been shot — a sharp drop from three years ago, but still higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to city data.
Xzavier is one of at least 11 children killed by gunfire this year.
Xzavier Gregory (center) was a goofy teen who attended Northeast High School, his parents said.
Javier and Gregory said some relatives are considering leaving Philadelphia, shaken by Xzavier’s killing and a feeling that teens don’t fear consequences.
But the parents said they will stay. They want to be near Magnolia Cemetery, where Xzavier is buried, and to feel closer to the memories that briefly unite them with him.
On harder days, they said, they go into his bedroom, which is just as he left it, a relic of a teenage boy.
His PlayStation controller sits in the middle of his bed, and a photo of him and his mother hangs on the wall above it. His Nike sneakers are scattered. His black backpack rests on the floor, and a Spider-Man mask sits on the corner of his bedframe.
On Thursday, his parents stood in the room they used to complain was too messy, that smelled like dirty laundry.
“Now, I come in just to smell it,” Javier said.
She took a deep breath.
Staff writer Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.
Sherri Horsey Darden has no family history of brain cancer, nor has she been having persistent headaches, seizures, or any other symptoms that could suggest a tumor.
But when she heard the Brain Tumor Foundation, a New York-based charity, was offering free magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans in Philadelphia, she made sure to get an appointment.
“A lot of times people have things and don’t know,” she said.
She received her scan at Triumph Baptist Church of Philadelphia in North Philadelphia, where the foundation was offering scans last week to the general public. She’ll receive her results within a couple weeks.
The foundation has hosted these screening events for more than a decade, with the goal of promoting early detection of brain tumors.
Using MRI scans for preventive health screening hasgrown increasingly popular in recent years, with celebrities like Kim Kardashian touting expensive whole-bodyscans on social media.
But many doctors worry that the risks outweigh the benefits. They say that screening MRIs of the brain could lead to unnecessary surgeries and anxiety, and that catching a brain tumor early wouldn’t always change a person’s outcomes. These scans are not typically covered by insurance if not ordered by a doctor, and can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000.
“There, to date, is no data available at all that would suggest that this is a useful approach,” said Stephen Bagley, a neuro-oncologist at Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center.
In the best scenarios, preventive medical screening can help catch diseases early when they are most treatable, and give people peace of mind. But they can also lead to overdiagnosis, false positives, unnecessary stress, and costlyfollow-up procedures.
This is why expert panels carefully evaluate which screening tools should berecommended to the general public. Decisions by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, considered the gold standard for evidence-based preventive care, weigh the potential harms involved against the likelihood of improving outcomes.
Even the most common screenings for cancer, like mammograms for breast cancer and PSA tests for prostate cancer, have faced controversy and shifting guidelines regarding who should get them and how frequently they should be administered.
There is no medical evidence showingthat mass MRI screening is helpful. Still, all spots for the foundation’s multiday screening event at Triumph Baptist Church were claimed. Zeesy Schnur, executive director of the foundation, said they aim to scan 100 to 150 people in each city.
Juanita Young, her husband, and her friend all booked consecutive appointments last week. Though she hasn’t had any symptoms that would make her think she had brain cancer, she signed up “just wanting to know,” she said.
Juanita Young, her husband, and her friend all booked consecutive appointments to get screened.
Philadelphia visit
The idea for the early detection campaign came from Patrick Kelly, a now retired neurosurgeon who started the foundation in 1998.
He was frustrated to see the majority of his brain cancer patients die from the disease, and felt that treatment would be more effective if the tumors were found earlier, explainedSchnur, who has been at the foundation since 2000.
Kelly envisioned a future where, similar to going through the scanners at an airport security checkpoint, people could get a full scan of their body, “and then this piece of paper would pop out and say, ‘Hey, you have a problem here,’” Schnur recalled.
The foundation offers brain MRIs for free at their events, covering the cost of administering the scan and having a radiologist read it. They use a portable MRI machine that only scans the brain and takes approximately 15 minutes.
The foundation has chauffeured its machine all over the country through its “Sponsor-A-City” program, which allows people to donate the funds needed to bring the unit to a city of their choice. They usually pick cities that are demographically diverse.
The event in Philadelphia was sponsored by Alexandra Schreiber Ferman, who lives in the area, through the more than $50,000 she raised from running the New York City Marathon.
Schreiber Ferman’s paternal grandfather died from glioblastoma and was a patient of Kelly’s. Her family has been involved with the foundation since its inception.
Schreiber Ferman got her first scan five or six years ago, after she had been having headaches. She pressured her parents to get her in for an MRI when the foundation’s unit was in Brooklyn.
“Thankfully, everything was OK. I just was stressed out,” she said.
Having a family history of the cancer makes her and her family more alert when it comes to headaches and other symptoms. Schreiber Ferman received her second scan Tuesday morning at the screening event.
Alexandra Schreiber Ferman sponsored the Brain Tumor Foundation’s event in Philadelphia.
She said her family and people at the foundation feel that these scans should be “something that’s routine,” like mammograms and skin checks.
“My goal would be that getting a brain scan becomes just a routine part of aging,” she said.
Her father, who serves as chairman of the foundation, wants other people to have the chance to get screened and has helped sponsor past city visits.
However, he himself has only gotten one screening since the program first started, and no longer wants any more.
“My dad is adamant that he does not want to get a scan. I think for him, ‘ignorance is bliss,’” she said.
What doctors say
Screening tests have to meet certain criteria in order to become standard practice, explained Richard Wender, chair of family medicine and community health at Penn and former chief cancer control officer for the American Cancer Society.
A national leader in cancer screening, he would not recommend that people undergo MRIs to screen for brain cancer.
The first criteria for a screening tool to be recommended for the general population is that the disease is common, he said. The disease must also come with a high risk of harm or death and must have stages, so that it can be found before it causes symptoms.
Lastly, available treatments for the disease have to be able to reduce the risk of serious outcomes.
Brain cancer is unlikely to ever meet that criteria, Wender said, mainly because it isn’t common enough. There also isn’t sufficient evidence that finding a brain cancer earlier reduces the risk of a person dying from it.
For example, the most common malignant brain tumor, glioblastoma, is so aggressive and invasive from the start, it is always considered a grade four tumor, noted Bagley, who serves as section chief of neuro-oncology at Penn.
These cancers grow so quickly that the time between the tumor developing and someone showing up to the emergency room with symptoms is typically on the order of months, he said.
“You cannot cure it, no matter when you find it,” Bagley said.
A subset of brain tumors called grade two gliomas are slow-growing enough that catching them earlier could give a patient a better outcome. However, “it’s so rare, you’d have to do so many of these MRIs to find those tumors,” he said.
Another issue with screening the general population is that there will inevitably be false positives.
Some abnormalities in the brain might look like possible tumors on MRIs but turn out to be harmless.
Yet, the person would have to undergo a medical procedure, such as a brain biopsy, to prove that it isn’t cancer.
“You end up putting the patient through invasive brain procedures, lots of anxiety, and existential distress for what ends up to be nothing,” Bagley said.
The same goes for benign brain tumors like meningioma, the most common type of brain tumor in adults. Roughly 39,000 cases are reported each year in the United States. A “very tiny percentage” of these ever become malignant, and it’s unknown if catching them early would help the patient in the long run, Bagley said.
It might just mean the patient has to get MRIs every year for the rest of their life, or get surgery to remove a tumor that probably never would have been become a problem.
Some of these patients have ended up seeking follow-up care fromRicardo Komotar, a neurosurgeon who directs the University of Miami Brain Tumor Initiative in Florida, after finding out they had benign tumors from screening MRIs. He tells these “super nervous” patients that it’s nothing to worry about, but now that they’ve found it, he has to follow it.
As of right now, there is no good screening mechanism when it comes to the brain, Komotar said. He recommends only imaging a person’s brain if there’s a reason, such as a seizure, weakness, or migraines, or an injury, such as in a car accident.
“Brain MRIs as screening have not been proven to help and, in my experience, they only hurt,” Komotar said.
More research needed
Ethan Schnur checks on James Brown as he has his early detection brain tumor screening at the Brain Tumor Foundation event in Philadelphia.
When the foundation first started offering scans, they were finding potential abnormalities in one out of every 100 people they screened. Those included anything from a brain tumor, to silent stroke, to an aneurysm.
One example was a man from Staten Island who had no symptoms, but through the scan, found out he had a nonmalignant brain tumor. He got surgery to remove it.
“He called us afterward to thank us,” Schnur said.
Their stance is that these MRIs should be part of standard of care, so that anyone who wants one has the option.
The foundation has partnered with Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City for a formal research study using data from their screening events.
John Park, the lead researcher and chief of neurosurgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital, said the study will help assess whether screening MRIs for a general populationcould be useful. They aim to screen up to thousands of patients.
“We don’t know if it will be effective or not,” Park said.
If the study were to suggest the scans are effective, there would still need to be a large randomized trial to validate those conclusions, Wender said.
Park’s team will also look at demographic information in an effort to identify risk factors for brain tumors and other abnormalities.
Research into risk factors could help justify whether certain populations should get routine screeningMRIs, Bagley said. He noted that patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a rare genetic disease that predisposes people to developing cancer, are already recommended to get whole-body MRI scans yearly because they’re known to be at such high risk.
Other than those patients, “we don’t really have any way to say this large group of patients is at high risk for this type of brain tumor,” Bagley said.
A handful of patients have ended up seeking care at Penn from Bagleyafter paying for a whole-body MRI from a private company. These are people who were “completely fine” before happening to find a brain tumor on their scans, he said.
One of them was diagnosed with glioblastoma.
He isn’t sure yet whether being diagnosed earlier will actually extend the patient’s survival time. It might just mean the patient gets a few months’ head start on treating the tumor.
“It’s totally unclear if he did himself any justice by finding this terrible brain cancer any earlier. It’s incurable either way,” Bagley said.
Talk to most nonprofit chief executives, and they’ll be able, on cue, to recite a heartwarming story about someone their organizations helped.
And the Rev. Luis Cortés Jr., Esperanza’s founder and chief executive, can do it, too.
But he’d rather talk about a sin he committed as a little boy — a sin that impacted his thinking for a lifetime and allowed him to understand how to build a $111.6 million organization with 800 employees that educates, develops, uplifts, and houses 35,000 people a year in the heart of North Philadelphia’s predominantly Hispanic Hunting Park neighborhood.
When Cortés was 12, he stole a Snickers candy bar from the bodega his father owned in New York City’s Spanish Harlem.
Oh, his father figured it out, and quickly, too, because he began to ask little Luis some important questions:
Did the 12-year-old know how many Snickers bars the bodega would have to sell to break even — not only on the box of Snickers, but on the taxes and utilities for the entire store? More importantly, how many Snickers bars would be required to turn a profit — a profit that could be reinvested?
“You need to understand finance, whether it’s a box of Snickers or a multimillion-dollar bond to build a school. Where is the money coming from, and what’s the repayment structure?” Cortés said.
Outside, as he spoke, a crane moved materials in what will soon become a new culinary school.
“Understanding finance is important, and understanding culture is important, and you have to understand the relationship between the two.”
So, yes, Cortés can and did tell the story about the mother who came to Esperanza to learn English skills, who got help to get a job and a house, who sent her daughter to Esperanza’s charter school and to Esperanza’s college, and now that same daughter is getting a house thanks to Esperanza’s mortgage counseling help.
Students Jayliani Casioano, Oryulie Andujar, Derek Medina, and Natalia Kukulski use an interactve anatomy table. The students are members of is the Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA).
All good. But this is what Cortés really wants people to know:
“If people trust us with their funds,” he said, “we’re putting the money into institutions, and institutions build culture.”
That’s why Esperanza has a K-12 charter school, a cyber school, a two-year college that’s a branch campus of Eastern University, a 320-seat theater, an art gallery, computer labs, an immigration law practice, a neighborhood revitalization office, a CareerLink office for workforce development and job placement, a music program, a youth leadership institute, housing and benefit assistance, and a state-of-the-art broadcasting facility.
Cortés even likes to brag about the basketball court. “Three inches of concrete, maple wood flooring, fiberglass backboards — NBA standards.”
“Think about Paoli. It has a hospital, a public school, a theater. Paoli has all of that, and it’s understood that that’s the quality of life. We have to have access to those same things at a different price point,” he said. “Notice I didn’t say different quality. I said different price point.
“We want to create an opportunity community, where people can have a good life — with arts, housing, healthcare, financial literacy, education, all those pieces — regardless of your family income,” he said.
“What’s important here and what’s different is that in all our places, all our facilities are first class,” Cortés said.
“I grew up in a low-income community where people were always telling you to step up, but step up to what?” he asked. “Where is the vision? What is possible to even have? How can anyone know unless they can see it?”
So, when people from the community visit Esperanza, “you can see that you can have the best facilities with state-of-the-art equipment. As a provider of services, we have to step up,” he said, in turn always giving people the tools and resources they need to step up.
For example, on Citizenship Day, Sept. 20, Anu Thomas, an attorney and executive director of Esperanza’s Immigration Legal Services, trained a dozen volunteer lawyers and law students on the fine points and recent pitfalls in the process of applying for citizenship.
Soon, the room was crowded with people coming for help.
Watching from the sidelines was Charlie Ellison, executive director of the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, who noted that an estimated 60,000 legal residents of Philadelphia are eligible to apply for citizenship.
“Clinics like these are critically important to helping people who might be facing barriers,” including the cost of getting legal help. “This bridges a lot of gaps. It’s a vital mission, now more than ever,” he said.
For Neury “Tito” Caba, a men’s fashion designer, tailor, and director of green space at Historic Fair Hill, citizenship help from Esperanza was a family affair. Through Esperanza, he, his grandmother, and his mother all became citizens.
“Now I can vote, and that’s the most positive thing I can do,” he said. “And also, things being the way they are, it gives me some sort of protection.”
Fashion designer Neury “Tito” Caba talks about his citizenship experience at Esperanza.
Earlier this fall at Esperanza’s CareerLink branch, counselor Sylvia Carabillo helped Luis Rubio on the computer. He was trying to extend his unemployment benefits and looking for a job as a security guard. Agueda Mojica was being tutored in Esperanza’s most popular workforce class: Introduction to Computers.
“I want to become more independent to be able to do anything on a computer,” she said in Spanish, speaking through a translator. “I was always working and never had time to learn.”
Much of Esperanza’s staff is bilingual in Spanish, but to help people from the neighborhood, Esperanza also hired counselors who speak Ukrainian and Kreyòl for Haitians who live nearby.
In Esperanza College classrooms a few weeks ago, Esperanza Academy high schoolers enrolled as college students had just finished a chemistry exam. When they graduate from high school, they’ll already have associate degrees on their résumés.
For them, Esperanza represents a future.
There’s Oryulie Andujar, 18, who wants to study sonography because an ultrasound technician found a cyst in her mother’s uterus. “We could have lost her. That was very impactful for me.”
Jayliani Casiano, 17, wants to go into anesthesiology. The oldest of seven, she witnessed her mother giving birth to several younger siblings. “She was in a lot of pain. It was interesting. I want to do everything after seeing her through that process.”
Derek Medina, 18, said the opportunity to go to college “made me rethink my whole life.” He had been getting into trouble in school, but now wants to combine a love of mathematics and a desire to help people by going into the field of biomedical engineering.
Recently, on Nov. 14, Esperanza College hosted its Ninth Annual Minorities in Health Sciences Symposium, designed to acquaint high schoolers with medical careers.
Construction will soon begin to convert a former warehouse space into a center to teach welding and HVAC in an apprenticeship program.
Next month, it’ll be time for “Christmas En El Barrio” with music, food, and community in Teatro Esperanza — admission is free. In January, the Philadelphia Ballet will perform there. Tickets are $15 and free for senior citizens and students.
“My worst seat — in Row 13 — would be $250 at the Academy of Music,” Cortés said. He wants to offer the arts at a price and a time available to a mother of three, who may not be able to afford even the cheapest seats in downtown venues, plus bus fare, “and heaven forbid the child wants a soda,” Cortés said.
All this adds up to culture, which brings him back to the Snickers bar, and not just breaking even, but investing.
Other groups, Cortés said, had to build their own institutions when mainstream organizations put up barriers. Howard University helped Black people, Brandeis served Jewish people, and Notre Dame provided education to the Irish.
Building an institution is his investment goal with Esperanza, and he takes as his mentors famous Philadelphia pastors such as the Rev. Leon Sullivan, who founded Progress Plaza in North Philadelphia, and the Rev. Russell Conwell, the Baptist minister who founded Temple University.
“Philadelphia has a tradition that its clergy don’t just do clergy things,” he said, admitting that he doesn’t have the patience for a more traditional pastor’s role. “As clergy here, it’s understood that we snoop around everything.”
Cities sometimes brag that their poverty rates have declined, he said, when in reality, rates have declined because people with low incomes were forced to move away.
Philadelphia, he said, has a chance to be different — to lower the poverty level both by raising people’s incomes and improving their standards of living. “There should be Esperanzas in every neighborhood,” he said.
“How can we focus on helping the people who just need a break?” Cortés said, referencing Jesus’ admonishment to “help the least of these.”
“This city has the opportunity to make this a win-win,” he said, “to show the rest of the country and Washington, D.C. — especially Washington, D.C. — that people who are different, and people who are `the other’ can be supported, so that they are not only part of the fabric of the city, but economic drivers of the city.”
This article is part of a series about Philly Gives — a community fund to support nonprofits through end-of-year giving. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.
For more information about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.
AboutEsperanza
People Served: 35,000
Annual Spending: $111.6 million across all divisions
Point of Pride: Esperanza empowers clients to transform their lives and their community through a diverse array of programs, including K-14 education, job training and placement, neighborhood revitalization and greening, housing and financial counseling, immigration legal services, arts programming, and more.
You Can Help: Esperanza welcomes volunteers for community cleanups, plantings, and other neighborhood events. Some programs also need volunteers with specific skills (lawyers, translators, etc.).
$25 covers the cost of one private music lesson for a young student through our Artístas y Músicos Latinoamericanos program.
$50 provides printing and distribution of 30 “Know Your Rights” brochures to immigrant families.
$100 pays for five hours of training for a new mentor fellow at the Esperanza Arts Center, preparing a young person for a career in arts production through hands-on learning.
$275 funds the planting of one street tree in a neighborhood that desperately needs additional tree cover to address extreme heat.
$350 covers tuition and books for one English as a second language student at the Esperanza English Institute.
$550 supports the cost of the initial work authorization for an asylum-seeker.
City Councilmember Jimmy Harrity wants to revisit the contentious debate that led to the 2017 creation of Philadelphia’s sweetened beverage tax, arguing that the levy has cost the city jobs and will eventually prove insufficient to pay for the programs it was enacted to support, such as subsidized prekindergarten.
“We‘re going to keep on pulling more money out of the general fund each year, taking away from other programs,” Harrity, a Democrat, said Monday at a hearing of Council’s Labor and Civil Service Committee, which he chairs. “If we were in business and these numbers were the numbers of the business, we wouldn’t be in business long.”
The tax, which is paid by distributors of sweetened beverages sold in Philadelphia, is 1.5 cents per ounce. Council approved it in 2016 despite vociferous opposition from the beverage industry and Teamsters Local 830, which testified Monday the tax has led to 1,000 of its members who drove trucks for distributors losing work.
Harrity,an ally of the Teamsters, noted that revenue from the tax has declined as Philadelphians either drink fewer sweetened beverages or find ways to purchase them outside the city. The tax produced about $73.4 million in the 2023 fiscal year, but only $64.4 million last year, he said.
A Council staffer arranges a table of sugary drinks before Councilmember Jimmy Harrity (not shown) holds a hearing in City Council Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages.
For Harrity, that means that the city should consider eliminating the “soda tax,” as it is widely known, in favor of a more “sustainable” funding stream. He did not offer any alternatives.
But based on his colleagues’ reactions, it is unlikely the tax will be reconsidered in a serious way any time soon.
Marcy Boroff with Children First dresses as a coke can for a City Council hearing Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. She was there to support the tax. Children First advocates for policy changes to improve child health, education, and welfare, especially for low-income children. .
And they stressed its critical role in paying for the three initiatives that Kenney launched alongside the tax: PHL Pre-K, which provides free childcare to 5,250 kids; community schools, which offer a multitude of services to families in 20 Philly schools; and the Rebuild program, which renovates and improves recreation centers and playgrounds.
“We have to make tough decisions that will actually benefit the greater good, and that’s what we did here,” Democratic Councilmember Rue Landau said during the hearing, adding that “the majority of us up here on this panel think this is a great investment.”
“We would not have been able to fund these programs without that beverage tax money,” said city Finance Director Rob Dubow, who has held his role under Parker, Kenney, and former Mayor Michael A. Nutter. Nutter twice tried unsuccessfully to implement a “soda tax” before Kenney succeeded.
Dubow told lawmakers that the decline in the tax’s revenue over time was always part of the plan and that city leaders intended for the regular city budget to make up the difference for funding Rebuild, pre-K, and community schools when they created the tax. The moment when the soda tax began taking in less money than the city pays out for the three programs it helped launch was the 2024 fiscal year, he said.
“We pay for it out of the general fund, which is what we always intended we would do,” Dubow said.
This year, Rebuild, pre-K, and community schools are projected to cost $110 million, Dubow said. Of that, $73 million pays for the 5,250 slots in the city’s pre-K program.
Preschoolers and their caregivers attend a City Council hearing held by Councilmember Jimmy Harrity Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. The tax funds the city’s universal pre-kindergarten program
‘Why not Taj Mahals?’
Councilmember Brian O’Neill was the only other Council member besides Harrity to vocally criticize the tax at Monday’s hearing.
O’Neill, Council’s lone Republican, noted that Council members have traditionally had control over capital funding for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation projects in their districts. That money, he noted, is split evenly among the 10 district Council members.
“This program — Rebuild, they call it — they didn’t decide to bring playgrounds up to some minimum level where people over the years may not have spent their money well,” O’Neill said. “They decided to build Taj Mahals in many cases. … You know what happens when you build a playground and spend tons of money on it? … All the playgrounds around it look terrible.“
Councilmember Brian J. O’Neill (center) speaks during a hearing in City Council Monday, Oct. 27, 2025 on former Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on sweetened beverages. Behind him, front to rear, are: Councilmembers Kendra Brooks, Jimmy Harrity, Nina Ahmad, and Rue Landau.
That comment did not go over well with some of his colleagues.
“My community benefited from a rec center that was through the Rebuild program,” said Councilmember Kendra Brooks, a member of the progressive Working Families Party who lives in Nicetown. “It’s not a Taj Mahal. It’s a quality rec center in the middle of North Philadelphia. It does not have everything, because I personally went and bought a refrigerator.”
And Councilmember Nina Ahmad, a Democrat, questioned why building grandiose rec centers would be a problem in the first place.
“Why not Taj Mahals for all our folks? Why not have the best-quality rec centers so our children want to go there, our children want to spend time there?” Ahmad said. “We live in a first-world country and yet we are begging for scraps for our youngest citizens.”
The worst of the coronavirus pandemic that started nearly six years ago is well in the past, but Philadelphia’s biggest nonprofit health systems are still contending with the financial disruption unleashed by the virus that led to thousands of deaths in the area.
Operating conditions for hospitals started improving in 2023, but “the slope of the recovery is a bit more shallow than a lot of health systems had planned for,” said Mark Pascaris, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit ratings agencies.
Patients have returned, but the pandemic led to a resetting of expensesfor labor and supplies at a higher level, Pascaris said. “That’s been the challenge over the last two or three or four years now, trying to manage through a very challenging expense situation,” he said.
To show how the financial landscape has changed, The Inquirer compiled financial data for the region’s six biggest health systems that have fiscal years ending June 30 each year. The analysis compared average operating profits in three years before the pandemic (fiscal years 2017-19) to the results in most recent three years (fiscal years 2023-25).
All six systems showed a substantial drop in a measure of earnings that excludes certain accounting expenses and interest costs. This slice of financial results is known as earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization. Abbreviated as EBIDA, it’s a primary indicator watched by influential credit ratings agencies.
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The experience of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia clearly illustrates what has happened: The organization’s aggregate revenue in the most recent three fiscal years was 58% higher than it was in the three years that ended June 30, 2019, but its EBIDA climbed only by half a percentage point.
“Hospitals and healthcare systems across the country continue to face significant headwinds, driven by reimbursement challenges, increased supply and labor costs, uncertain governmental pressures, and the continued ripple effect of the pandemic,” CHOP said in a statement.
Officials at ChristianaCare, Main Line Health, and Temple University Health System echoed CHOP’s remark.
“Margins were far better prior to the pandemic, largely due to lower supply and labor costs,” Main Line’s chief financial officer Leigh Ehrlich said. “Those costs rose sharply during the pandemic and continue to rise.”
ChristianaCare’s CFO Rob McMurray noted: Not only have Medicare and Medicaid rates not kept up with inflation, but more people have those government forms of insurance for people 65 and older and for low-income people.
The nonprofit is expanding from its base in northern Delaware to Southeastern Pennsylvania and is expanding alternative formats, such as hospital-care-at-home and micro hospitals, to reduce costs, McMurray said.
A significant worry for Temple University Health System is the impact of the 2025 budget reconciliation bill, sometimes called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The North Philadelphia nonprofit estimates that Medicaid cuts in that law will cost it $519 million over the next 10 years, said Jerry Oetzel, the system’s CFO.
That’s the message Philadelphia city officials want to send to people considering illegally dumping garbage in the city as a new enforcement unit hits the streets.
The officers are armed with violation notices that could cost dumpers $5,000 per item. That means that tossing four tires into a vacant lot — which several years ago would have resulted in a ticket for a couple of hundred bucks, max — can now run a violator the price of a Honda and result in arrest.
The new unit of 40 officers focused on identifying the people who dump is part of an expanded task force that Mayor Cherelle L. Parker announced on Thursday. The group also includes a dozen people who monitor 400 surveillance cameras placed near frequent dumping sites, as well as partners in the police department who investigate severe cases.
“Part of the reason why people think it’s open season to illegally dump in the city of Philadelphia … it’s because they never thought that enforcement would occur,” Parker said. “Besides it being unsightly and unhealthy for people, it’s a crime.”
City officials said they have brought 17 cases against people who dumped waste illegally so far this year, resulting in more than $3.7 million in collected fines.
The mayor said her administration would ramp up that effort with the initiation of the task force.
“Philly ain’t playin’,” she said.
Members of the new Illegal Dumping Task Force stand during an introductory press conference with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, at 10th and Courtland Streets in Philadelphia.
Parker made the announcement while standing in North Philadelphia’s infamous Logan Triangle, the 35-acre plot that has been an eyesore for the better part of 50 years. It was once home to hundreds of rowhouses, but the families moved out in the 1980s when it became clear their homes were sinking into the bed of the Wingohocking Creek.
Today, the triangle is a cautionary tale of failed redevelopment — a place where ideas like a basketball center or a dirt bike track or an apple orchard have never been realized. It is now, and has long been, a dumping site.
It’s also the site where, last week, two people were arrested for unloading trash, said Carlton Williams, the city’s director of clean and green initiatives.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker (right) and Carlton Williams (left) of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives announce stricter laws to combat illegal dumping during a news conference at Logan Triangle, a frequent dumping site at 10th and Courtland Streets, on Thursday in Philadelphia.
Not only could those people face criminal penalties, but the administration is focused on levying hefty fines and holding dumpers responsible for cleanup costs. The city is also newly fining people who hire contractors to short dump.
“We’re gonna hit you where it hurts: in the pocketbook,” Parker said.
Despite the spending, many in the city say dumping sites are a major problem. A 2023 Lenfest Institute for Journalism/SSRS poll of 1,200 Philadelphians found that six in 10 residents believed reducing dumping should be a top priority for the mayor. Concern was most acute among residents who are low-income, Black, and Latino.
City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, a Democrat and a Parker ally whose district borders Logan Triangle, said the administration’s focus on illegal dumping can begin to remedy what she described as “extremely stressful” situations for residents who have long watched waste pile up near their homes without abatement.
“Our residents have done their part, and those calls for help went unanswered for a really, really long time,” Lozada said. “But today feels different.”
How to report illegal dumping
Anyone who sees illegal dumping happening can call 911. Residents who want to report illegal dumping after the fact can file a complaint through 311.
