"Food security" is a concept that only recently became part of popular conversation, but for Yael Lehmann, executive director of The Food Trust, the fight for national food security has been a long-time mission.
 
Even if she never saw herself at the front lines.
 
Originally from San Francisco, Lehmann had always been interested in public health and social justice. When she was graduating from high school, the AIDS crisis was decimating the city.
 
"I was watching and seeing all the people impacted by it," she recalls. "At one of the restaurants I worked at, half the staff died of AIDS. It was this very intense time, but it was amazing to watch people come together, whether it was people helping their friends by bringing them food or getting together in the streets advocating for policy change, starting from scratch and hitting it from all sides at the community level, the individual level and the policy level. That really influenced my decision to go into public health."
 
Lehmann eventually left the Bay Area for the East Coast, figuring she would check it out for a few years and then come back. She didn’t.

"My mom is still kind of pissed," she says with a laugh.
 
San Francisco's loss has been Philadelphia's gain. Lehmann helped grow the Food Trust from a tiny organization with just a handful of employees to a local institution with a staff of 130. The employees are primarily located in Philadelphia, but two work in the Bay Area and one in Boston.
 
When the West Coast transplant first arrived in Philadelphia, she applied for a job at a farmers' market on a whim. There, she met Duane Perry, founder of the Food Trust, and was "completely taken and inspired by him." She didn't know a lot about food access at the time, and couldn't imagine she would still be at the organization 15 years later.
 
"All my previous jobs had been as a research assistant, looking at data sets and creating reports," she explains. "I wasn't like, I am a leader. I didn't see myself as executive director. But in 2005 Perry came to me and said he was retiring quite unexpectedly, and after I stopped sobbing he asked if I would consider applying."
 
A decade later, the Food Trust is a national leader in food access and social justice initiatives, and the approach they take is a comprehensive one.
 
The organization's flagship program is running farmers' markets -- they manage 30 markets throughout Philadelphia that range in size from one to 40 vendors, working with a total of 200 local farmers. These pop-up stalls serve a dual function: improving neighborhood access to healthy foods and supporting local farms.
 
The Food Trust had its earliest beginnings at Reading Terminal Market. At one point, Perry ran the storied food hall and was the organizer for all the merchants there. The market was struggling and he helped galvanized the city to save it, forming the Reading Terminal Farmers Market Trust in 1992. That was the beginning of the Food Trust. Reading Terminal remains the largest redeemer of food stamps in the state.
 
The Food Trust's mission is to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food and the information to make healthy decisions. All but two of their farmers' markets are in low-income neighborhoods. A program called Philly Food Bucks offers $2 back for every $5 spent with food stamps at the market, increasing a person's buying power by 40 percent. The group also runs cooking demonstrations using ingredients available at the market that day and gives out additional Food Bucks at the end.
 
"What I love about our work with the Food Trust is coming at public health from a social justice perspective," enthuses Lehmann. "In low-income areas in Philadelphia and all across the country food options can be very dismal. There's so much more awareness now. There used to be a point that I had to spend a lot of time explaining the work we do and justifying it, and now, in the last five years, there is huge awareness around it."
 
She credits First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative, but also the rise of "foodie culture" -- as twee as it can often be, it has also had a monumental impact on the conversation about the things we eat and where they come from. The Food Trust has tapped into that trend with its wildly popular neighborhood Night Markets.
 
The organization's programming also includes education and incentives for people to buy healthy items in grocery stores, corner stores and farmers markets'. The organization advocates for food stamps, works with hundreds of area corner stores to stock healthier foods without having to sacrifice profits, and has a research team dedicated to public policy work.
 
"I love how all those different things inform the other," says Lehmann. "We're trying to research what the impacts of our programs are, which informs our programming and public policy. We work with Policy Link on the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which has made it possible for community development banks to apply for funding to do a whole variety of healthy food projects throughout the country, like food hubs and urban markets -- a huge range of cool projects from a federal level program."  
With help from the Food Trust, Philadelphia has become known for its success combatting childhood obesity. Through a randomized control trial, the organization demonstrates their ability to reduce the number of overweight kids by 50 percent through their programs. But Lehmann is sure to point out that they are not in the business of weight loss.

"All of our work at Food Trust is on the prevention side," she explains. "We're not clinicians. We're working with people to help them eat better before they get overweight in the first place. Diet-related diseases like diabetes are off the charts in Philadelphia, and a lot of the kids consider them to be inevitable. This is not about weight, but about health."
 
The rates of childhood obesity have actually decreased in the city, notably in children of color.

"There is usually a big racial disparity," says Lehmann. "I really believe it's this comprehensive approach, hitting it form many different angles -- improving access to nutritional food and education -- is what brought on this change. When the childhood obesity stats came out there was a lot of interest in trying to find solutions and find people who had success. Eight to 10 years ago when those stats exploded, that was when national organizations began to approach us. Today we work all over the country. We're doing the same thing we do in Philadelphia, just all over the place."
 
Youth outreach is essential to the work they do. Food Trust staff visits schools, community centers, churches and food pantries, reaching about 50,000 kids every year.

"The approach that we take is to be less lecturing and more interaction to make it more fun," enthuses Lehmann. "It's more a celebration of food, and food as a vehicle to bring people together, rather than making people feel bad about what they're eating on a daily basis."
 
Fiftteen years ago, Lehmann might not have envisioned herself where she is today, but as the head of one of the most successful food justice advocacy organizations in the country, it's safe to say she is exactly where she is supposed to be. 

This profile was originally published by Urban Innovation Exchange in partnership with Meeting of the Minds and Kresge Foundation. For more stories of people changing cities, visit UIXCities.com and follow @UIXCities.