For years the Ben Franklin Parkway has been the site of weekly, monthly, and annual homeless outreach meals organized by various groups based in the Philadelphia area. Whether members of the homeless population had congregated in that area previously or the feedings drew them to the Parkway is lost to memory. The area has seen feedings organized by religious groups; student service projects at college, high school, and elementary levels; and revolutionary or activist groups, among others. These initiatives have come under criticism for encouraging homeless people to stay on the street and wait to be fed rather than going to indoor feedings offered by churches and shelters, where outreach is deemed more effective. The “Breaking Bread Initiative” is a recently adopted initiative headed by the city to move organizations that have fed people outside in the past inside, into participating churches. The goal is to better address homelessness by removing people from the street and conducting outreach in a comfortable place where food and lavatories are available.

Susan Snyder’s recent article chronicles one conflict of ideologies in the effort to help homeless people. "You can't make people go in and get services," says Veronica Joyner, CEO of the Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School, in Snyder’s article. Joyner’s school community has been feeding roughly the same group of people near JFK Plaza in Center City for over a year. Her group was recently told by city officials to move their efforts elsewhere in the hope that the people that her group had been providing food would then begin turning to the increasing number of churches whose doors are opening, for food and outreach. "It does no good to feed someone on the Parkway and then leave them there with no place to go," according to one city official who spoke to Snyder.

It is easy to portray the city’s Breaking Bread plan as harsh. It requires that groups that have gone to the Parkway for years abandon their work in the hope that homeless people will begin going to the participating churches--a truth that makes the feeding organizations a sort of martyr. These groups, however, each have their unique ideological slants, for example; one of the goals of S.H.I.P. (Serving the Homeless In Philadelphia) is to “allow student-volunteers to become more aware of our society outside of the Swarthmore community”. These groups have fed many homeless Philadelphians, but their work on the Parkway is not the best way to help the homeless population in the long run.