PHILADELPHIA — Linda James-Rivera clutches a piece of paper and watches volunteers swirl around her at a food distribution warehouse in Northwest Philadelphia.
The 62-year-old sits on a rolling chair — a heart valve replacement and lupus diagnosis make long periods of standing difficult. The text on her sweatshirt reads, “Food is a right, not a privilege.”
“Hi, sweetheart,” James-Rivera says tenderly to a volunteer who walked in for a pickup. “How are you? Your bags are here. Route 7.”
A similar scene unfolds every week when James-Rivera and a team of volunteers help package food for her clients, as she calls them. Drivers wheel bags of produce and shelf-stable items to their cars, then drop them off at homes scattered around the northwest part of the city. They distribute nearly 8,200 pounds of food each shift.
James-Rivera repeatedly looks at her document — a spreadsheet of client names with painstakingly collected details about their medical background and dietary considerations — to make sure volunteers are paired with the right food. Gluten-free bread for this client. Tofu for the vegetarian household. No pork products for a Muslim client. If a client has diabetes or high blood pressure, she knows it thanks to the “strenuous” intake form.
“It takes a lot of time packing these bags,” she says, a nod to her 7 a.m. arrival alongside some volunteers at the warehouse, several hours before the pickups would be ready. She suddenly turns to another volunteer waiting for instructions. “All your people are here and accounted for,” she says with a smile.
James-Rivera’s cheerfulness that spring Saturday morning masked the increasing challenges of her job as founder and executive director of the Northwest Mutual Aid Collective, Inc., a nonprofit that provides food to homebound people in Philadelphia. The organization has a $275,000 annual budget and receives no state or federal money — just local donations along with some foundation support and corporate matching. Last year, they spent $18,000 on groceries. They’re at $22,000 as of late May, the byproduct of rising costs and an expanding number of clients.
Women like James-Rivera disproportionately make up the safety net that fills in where the government doesn’t. For many of them, federal policy changes are making their jobs more challenging than ever. James-Rivera’s clients — 100 households, the bulk of which are women-led — are lower-income, older or living with a disability. Many are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal anti-hunger program known as SNAP, which is undergoing changes.
In recent months, James-Rivera has observed, some clients have reported a drop in their monthly benefits from SNAP that have long offset the food they get from Northwest Mutual Aid Collective. Some clients have reported receiving letters notifying them about new work requirements. Are they getting kicked off SNAP? they often ask. Some don’t realize James-Rivera’s program is not government funded, and fear grips them: Is the Collective going away, too?
The federal changes, which are rolling out as part of the “big, beautiful” law enacted one year ago this week, include a higher age cap for work requirements to be on SNAP — from age 55 to 65. Parents with children between ages 14 and 18 must now also work when they were previously exempt. Other groups, like veterans and youth leaving the foster care system, are also no longer exempt from work requirements — shifting rules that Pennsylvania officials estimate could impact more than 140,000 people in the state.
These changes have been confusing James-Rivera’s clients for months, she said. Many do not leave their homes regularly or have reliable internet access. As they get news about upended eligibility rules and whether they qualify for exemptions, they tend to call James-Rivera instead of the government-backed hotline numbers.
“A lot of them don’t have a clear understanding of what the new rules are, and because they don’t know who to turn to or how to access the information, we become their source of information,” she says. “So they call us to ask us, ‘Do we know? How does this work? Is there someone that I know that they can call?”
So why her and not the government? James-Rivera shrugs.
“We’re the phone that answers,” she says.
These are the emerging realities for workers in the community care space, a women-led workforce that has long stretched its dollars to do more with less. Now a mix of factors — including the growing expenses for food and utilities and the policy shifts under the law also known as HR 1 — are adding extra complications to a form of service work that has always involved unpaid labor.
James-Rivera’s commitments — to connect people with social services, city offerings or legal representation — stretch well beyond what she expected when she started the Collective in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. As food offerings like pantries and community refrigerators flourished around a city where food insecurity has been rising, she wanted to zero in on the people who could not physically make it out to food distribution sites. Today, the Collective offers the only food home delivery program of its kind in the city.
“Women are the safety net of everything,” said Stacie Sanchez Hare, director of No Kid Hungry Texas, an affiliate of the national organization that focuses on ending child hunger. “They are the teachers in the classrooms, the women in nonprofit spaces and food banks. We are definitely in a hunger crisis, and I have seen incredible women step up every day.”
One of those women is Liz Aubry, an organizer behind the Northeast Community Fridge, one of more than 30 such fridges in Philadelphia that are available 24/7. Aubry is among about 15 women who volunteer to help keep the refrigerator stocked through coordinated food donations. They have a group chat where they share photos of how full or empty the fridge is at different times of the day.
Aubry, who is a bartender by night, said there are days when the community’s need is so great that volunteers have to restock within an hour and a half.
“I sometimes have to step back and look at it as a whole. If I’m always looking at pictures of the fridge and it’s always teetering on empty, that’s kind of discouraging for me. So I have to be like, ‘Oh, in the month of May, we provided like 300 meals, that’s awesome,’” she said.
Aubry worries that the rising costs of everyday items will force people to donate less food and resources to the fridge even as need grows.
“We’re trying to lay foundations and lay systems to help people that the government isn’t helping,” she said. “But we were never meant to do all the work — we’re just a group of 15 women doing what we can.”
Juliet A. Williams, a professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said as some United States policymakers increasingly frame safety net programs as welfare handouts, anybody who helps fill a deficit in basic needs — such as leaders at food banks and pantries, schools and libraries — are offering more services than ever before. And it’s women who often take up jobs in these underpaid roles that are critical to the social safety net.
“Women are overrepresented in the so-called helping professions to begin with, and with the privatization of the welfare state — the government is asking for more unpaid labor to service the national needs,” she said.
James-Rivera’s client calls aren’t just about changes to SNAP but also Medicaid. Many of the families she serves are also enrolled in the program.
HR 1 mandates new work requirements for both SNAP and Medicaid, with changes being rolled out on varying timelines across states. New work requirements for SNAP have rolled out around the country, and Medicaid’s work requirements will go fully into effect in January 2027.
Between last July and March, enrollment in SNAP has declined by more than 4 million people, according to an ongoing data analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It is the largest drop in enrollment in decades.
Pennsylvania’s SNAP enrollment has dropped by more than 10 percent in that same time period. As of June 2025, an estimated 3.8 million people are no longer on Medicaid, according to a newly released report from the group Protect Our Care.
Advocacy groups that track hunger and health outcomes have warned that the law — which will cut almost $200 billion in SNAP and about $1 trillion in Medicaid over the next 10 years — will reduce people’s access to food and care.
Last November, when the federal government withheld SNAP benefits temporarily during a government shutdown, food banks quickly warned of the strain on their ability to feed more people. James-Rivera said half of her clients didn’t get notification about the shutdown’s impact on SNAP, so her organization put flyers in their delivery bags to help spread the word about resources to help offset the cuts. The Collective, in response, decided to expand its number of clients from roughly 70 households to 100. They didn’t have the budget to accommodate the changes, so they bought more bulk bags of food to find discounts.
“I wasn’t going to turn them away,” she said. “So whether we were ready or not, we pushed it.”
James-Rivera, who works six days a week, carries two phones on her — one for personal calls and one for work. On weekdays, she is either at the warehouse or at home, fielding inquiries from clients or following up on observations from the 50-plus volunteer drivers who spot when something may be wrong during their route drop-offs. They’re her eyes and ears into the community.
“I heard there’s a sign on your door,” James-Rivera said to someone who called unexpectedly that Saturday. She listened on her phone patiently while also keeping an eye on the batch of raspberries that was about to go out the door. “Are you OK?” she quietly asked the client, whose concrete steps outside their home had apparently crumbled enough to prompt a notice from the city. James-Rivera told the person she would follow up in a few days.
Women are intuitively connected to their communities, said Sanchez Hare. They understand needs and find solutions for problems.
“They have the communication skills and the connective tissue needed and the network building to pull these things off,” she said. “These things are Herculean tasks.”
But it’s a precarious balancing act, said Daphne Hernandez, a professor and developmental psychologist at UTHealth Houston. She said James-Rivera has built the kind of trust that strengthens the social safety net. But James-Rivera can only plug so many leaks; people experiencing food insecurity typically also struggle in other areas.
“That strain will spill over into poor mental health, so we’ll see rates of anxiety and depression increase,” she said. “We’re just talking about food right now, but food and housing are highly related. So individuals may use whatever funds they have to buy food this week, but they’re not paying their gas bills, they’re not paying their rent, they’re not paying some other basic need in order to get food this week.”
There is a waitlist to join the Collective’s home delivery program, a fact James-Rivera grapples with as the person most often on the line to explain why there’s not more to go around.
“There’s a lot of crying,” she said. “You know how hard it is to tell an 80-year-old that you can’t feed them?”
James-Rivera doesn’t know how long she will continue to run the Collective, which she does with her son and a part-time staffer. There is volunteer help from her husband, another family member and interns. She would like to retire in the next three to four years. She is determined to find someone to run the organization.
The long hours can be draining. A few years ago, James-Rivera decided to set more boundaries around her personal life. She doesn’t work on Sundays, in an effort to spend uninterrupted time with her family and to go to church.
Her faith continues to guide her on the hardest days.
“We don’t see this as a business. We see this as a ministry,” she said. “To us, it’s more than just, this is a job we’re doing. This is part of who we are as people — and it’s what we think God has called us to do.”
One of the Collective’s website taglines is about giving a hand up and not a handout.
“We don’t make them feel ashamed for asking for help or not understanding,” James-Rivera said. “They understand that we’re not looking at them as a charity case, we’re looking at them as part of our community — which women have done for centuries. They build community and they build a listening ear and a nurturing ear.”
