A Petition to the Members of Philadelphia City Council

As the Trump Administration and Project 2025 threaten to cut food assistance, healthcare, housing, workers’ rights, and civil rights protections, Philadelphia must choose a different path.

Project Beloved Community is our local response. It is a comprehensive ten-year plan to build an economy that Philadelphia’s people own and control, using the City’s existing powers, public investments, pension funds, and community ownership—not higher taxes on working families.

Project Beloved Community proposes to:

• Build 65,000 deeply affordable homes through community land trusts and permanently affordable social housing.
• Create 50,000 living wage jobs, including a $25 per hour minimum wage for all City connected workers.
• Help feed 50,000 Philadelphians who have lost SNAP benefits.
• Cut Black poverty in half.
• Increase Black household wealth by $1 billion through homeownership, cooperatives, and community investment.
• Reduce gun violence to near zero through sustained community led prevention and restoration.
• Establish a Philadelphia Public Bank that keeps our public dollars working in our own neighborhoods instead of Wall Street.
• Invest pension funds in city housing, clean energy, and community owned businesses while protecting strong returns for retirees.
• Expand worker, consumer, housing, and solar cooperatives that create local ownership, lower energy costs, and keep wealth circulating in our neighborhoods.
• Strengthen public schools as neighborhood hubs for education, opportunity, health, and community development, financial literacy centered on cooperative ownership.

We, the undersigned residents of Philadelphia, call upon City Council to pass the Project Beloved Community legislative package and build a city where every family has the opportunity to thrive. Together, we can create an economy that our communities own, reduce poverty and violence, expand opportunity, and build the Beloved Community envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sign today and help build a stronger, safer, and more prosperous Philadelphia.

Project Beloved Community is sponsored by: Just Nation, Philly Neighborhood Networks, Reclaim Philly, Philadelphia Banking Coalition, Frontline Dads, SEIU Healthcare, UNITE HERE, Penn Policy Center