Fareeda Mabry, founder of Operation Warm Hearts, recognizes the need to keep Philadelphia’s homeless warm this winter through organizing blanket drives. Last year, Philadelphia native Fareeda Mabry, 33, started a grass-roots organization known as Operation Warm Hearts with a simple goal in mind: Help those who cannot help themselves. The organization is seeking to collect…
Philadelphia is a city of innovators, a city of makers, a city of immense cultural and historic significance. There’s a reason why it was once the capital of the United States. As a native son of the city, President and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau (PHLCVB) Jack Ferguson represents Philadelphia to the…
What’s the next level of community reporting? For many, printed text and visuals make complex issues clear. Others absorb information best with audio and video. And the internet brings news to screens we touch. PlanPhilly decided to bring stories to life by tapping into another sense, taste, as well as memory. We focused on two…
Sometimes, it is difficult to articulate how I truly feel about the events playing out in this country. How disappointed I am that it is becoming less of what I thought it was when I was younger: a great place to live and thrive.
I started writing for Global Philadelphia in early 2013 and have been writing different pieces for them since then. They were nice enough to include me in their monthly newsletter last June. Super nice of them. You can read the small write-up on me below and check out the newsletter in all of its entirety…
I would be untruthful if I wrote that I had everything planned about what to do after I graduate from Arcadia University. There are other things that I wish to look into, such as working on obtaining my teaching license and maybe publishing my thesis once all of the kinks are ironed out
Walk down into Aminata Sy’s West Philadelphia basement, and you’ll see color splashed on the walls. There are self-portraits and large, red suns drawn in crayon, as well as maps of Africa highlighting the different countries of the continent. Sy, originally from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and later Senegal, runs…
Paul Johnson knows that it’s hard for people from the outside looking in to understand his story and his struggles. His life, he said, was never straightforward. Johnson, 26, attended and graduated from Overbrook high school and took a few college courses at the Community College of Philadelphia before dropping out. He soon took a…
In this first edition of a Broke in Philly-adjacent reporting series about unsung community leaders, the Pomona Cherokee Civic Council’s president describes people as the neighborhood’s greatest resource.