

Our Story
Our Mission
We bring fresh, local seafood to Philadelphia’s diverse communities.
Values
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Everyone deserves nice things.
Nice things — like a fulfilling job that pays well, and delicious, top-quality food — are things that everyone deserves to have: our members, our harvesters, our staff, and our students.
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Do thoughtful, place-based work.
We work in Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. Working in these communities is joyful and complicated, and not one-size-fits-all.
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Promote learning.
We do a lot of learning in this work, and we want to support everyone involved to learn as well - about fish, about the ocean, about seafood, about each other, and more.
Timeline
In 2016, Talia Young (our founder and executive director) was at a local seafood conference where she heard a fisherman say,
"Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets. We need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish!"
She thought to herself,
"Maybe we’re not thinking about all Americans..."
Talia, who is Chinese-American, thought back to all the seafood her family had eaten as a child. Crabs, lobster, jellyfish, scallops, shrimp, clams, jellyfish, abalone, whole fish, and more. And she thought about her other friends of color who also ate a lot of seafood. And she began to wonder what would happen if we connected local seafood harvesters with culturally diverse eating communities. Could it be win-win for everyone? Expanding markets for seafood harvesters while also increasing access to high quality food for consumers? And so the idea for Fishadelphia was born.
Talia used to be a high school teacher, and knew she wanted to engage young people in this project. So she and Tasha Palacio (our Assistant Director of Seafood Management and Youth Programming) worked with a group of high school students to launch the project, with expert help from George Mathis (our Seafood Wrangler). We sold our first fish in 2018, with 25 members and one pickup location. Since then we’ve expanded to more than 250 members and 15 pickup locations.
Our take on sustainability
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Environment
We want to support harvest of seafood that will allow us to continue to harvest into the future. Toward this goal, we buy and sell species that are “federally managed,” i.e., studied and managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
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Community
We want to support our seafood harvesting and eating communities, and we want to build an institution that will continue to make a difference into the future.
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Economic
We aren’t trying to get rich — we just want to make enough to continue to support and compensate our seafood harvesters, staff, students, and community members equitably.