Executive Director and Community Chef Matthew Stebbins is on a mission to feed Philadelphians in need.
In the summer of 2020 Chef Matthew Stebbins and a few friends set out to deliver meals to protestors along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. But his focus quickly shifted as he watched protestors walk past the city’s nearly 5,000 unhoused citizens without a second thought.
“That's who we need to be prioritizing in this space,” he says. “So… after that first day, we just had some conversations with some of the community members, and, you know, they were like, no one brings us hot food. No one brings us… anything that's substantial.”
Matthew Stebbins, Double Trellis Food Initiative. While he has worked at in some of Philadelphia’s top kitchens, including Townsend, Farm & the Fisherman and Laurel, Stebbins himself knows what it’s like to be without shelter and speaks openly about it, “The level of cold and hunger produced a feeling that I’ll never forget, and that serves as a major motivating factor that drives me to this day. My experience was the inspiration behind my work to make sure that nobody else ever has to feel the way I did that day.”
These experiences led to the formation of Double Trellis Food Initiative where Stebbins serves as Executive Director and Community Chef. Today, the nonprofit organization produces roughly 300 meals per day, which equates to approximately 1,200 meals per week, and nearly 5,000 meals per month.
“That day of distributing food and having conversations with people experiencing homelessness was an eye-opening experience for us, and it allowed us to identify and navigate where some of the governmental and societal shortcomings are,” says Stebbins.Carversville Farm Foundation, Sharing Excess, Northwest Mutual Aid Collective and Sharefood donate the majority of the produce used in meal preparation and what isn’t used is used to make stock or gets composted, making it a nearly zero-waste operation.
Double Trellis also partners with myriad other nonprofits and community fridges to maximize its impact, including Philly Food Rescue, Black Visioning Group, Serenity House, Homies Helping Homies, Elevation Project, Mastermind Cooperative, Workers Revolutionary Collective, South Philly Community Fridge, Mt. Airy Community Fridge & Pantry, YEAH Philly, Rock 2 the Future, The Fridge on 52nd, We Love Philly, Honeysuckle Projects, South Philly Punks with Lunch, The People's Kitchen, Kensington Soccer Club, West Philly Bunny Hop, Discovery Pathways and Germantown Community Fridges.
Since launching, Double Trellis has served roughly 100,000 meals that have fed 23,750 unique individuals in need. In addition to its meal program, Double Trellis offers a 4-month culinary training program in collaboration with YEAH Philly, to help provide culinary career-training for young adults that have been formerly incarcerated.
Moving forward, Stebbins is focused on fundraising so Double Trellis can continue to expand and feed those in need. "If someone wants to come along and solve this problem, I'll go back to making tweezer food," Stebbins quips.
Learn more at http://doubletrellis.org.
