Philly Mayor Cherelle L. Parker met with President Joe Biden during his visit to the city Monday

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker met with President Joe Biden Monday, riding with him in the presidential motorcade and accompanying him to a local food bank, just two weeks after she took office.

According to Parker’s administration, the mayor spoke with the president about how the federal government can assist the city in tackling public safety issues, affordable housing, and the opioid crisis afflicting the city’s Kensington neighborhood.

Their brief meeting was the second time the two have spoken this month, and underscored the significance Parker could have in Biden’s reelection campaign. She leads a deep-blue enclave of 1.6 million people and the largest city in Pennsylvania, a state that the president has already visited three times this month and that is crucial to his general election victory strategy.

Parker, the city’s first female mayor and one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent Black leaders, won a historically competitive Democratic primary election last year by consolidating support among Black and Latino voters. At the same time, recent polling has showed Biden’s support among voters of color has dropped precipitously since 2020, alarming Democrats who see those demographic groups as critical to his coalition.

The mayor, who was endorsed by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the general election last year, has indicated strong support for their reelection effort.

During an interview on CNN on Friday, Parker said her administration “wholeheartedly and a thousand percent supports the Biden-Harris team, and we know that they will continue to deliver infrastructure, jobs, education to help move the city of Philadelphia forward.”

“In the city of Philadelphia, our birthplace of democracy, we know Pennsylvania is a state at play, and Philadelphia’s turnout and participation is crucial to this election,” she said. “I will be doing everything that I possibly can to ensure that President Biden is reelected.”

After their brief ride in the presidential limo known as “The Beast,” Parker and Biden met with volunteers at Philabundance in South Philadelphia, where Biden has twice before spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The event was one of a handful of Day of Service celebrations Parker participated in, making for a packed holiday weekend schedule.

She started Monday at the Crystal Tea Room in the historic Wanamaker Building, where she delivered remarks during an annual breakfast hosted by the Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia, an organization of Black attorneys. The event drew a bevy of elected officials, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, and others.

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The mayor also spoke during a kickoff for volunteers at Girard College, where she helped prepare care packages and hygiene kits to be delivered to local hospitals and distributed to patients in need. She rang the bell at the Sixers game at the Wells Fargo Center, then was scheduled to dash to Old City for an event about women’s role in the civil rights movement.

But despite back-to-back events Monday, it was the evening before when Parker was perhaps most at home. On Sunday, she stood at the pulpit of the Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ, where the Black Clergy of Philadelphia & Vicinity held a service to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to honor the group’s own leaders.

Parker recalled her upbringing in Oak Lane about 10 blocks away from the church and said she attended Vacation Bible School down the street. She said the Black Clergy group, which endorsed her mayoral candidacy when she was still trailing in internal polls before the May primary, gave her a chance “when a whole lot of people treated me like I had the plague.”

She also announced that she intends to convene a roundtable of faith leaders to serve as advisers to her office, saying they’d play a key role in her administration and could influence its agenda to improve public safety, clean the city, and create jobs.

“Yes, I’m the 100th mayor of the city of Philadelphia, first woman, sixth largest city in the nation, birthplace of democracy,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean a darn thing if we don’t find a way to move the needle.”

And Parker implored them to hold her accountable.

“If you don’t see us, if your neighborhood doesn’t feel cleaner, and it doesn’t feel safer, and it’s not greener, and there are no economic opportunities flowing where you live,” she said, “you say, ‘Cherelle Parker, you spoke a good word, but you a phony like the rest of ‘em.’”