Linda James-Rivera clutches a piece of paper and watches volunteers swirl around her at a food distribution warehouse in Northwest Philadelphia. Changes to SNAP have made this work more complicated.

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,” underscoring this in the face of changes to SNAP.

“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 in the face of changes to SNAP. 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, showing the strain in the face of changes to SNAP. 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.

Read the full article about the Northwest Mutual Aid Collective by Barbara Rodriguez at The 19th.