Food banks strategies

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Multiple partnerships, sufficient funding, creative thinking and a lot of hard work. From attending the Food, Dignity and Choice: Ending Hunger in the Jewish Community forum last week, it seems that these are the four main requirements for a sustainable and accessible food distribution system that ensures that no one goes hungry.

Hosted by the Jewish Family Service Agency and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver at Temple Sholom on Oct. 1, the four speakers featured on the panel were Andrea Reimer, a Vancouver city councilor, Marilyn Herrmann, executive director of the Surrey Food Bank (SFB), Ian Marcuse, a community food developer with the Grandview Woodland Food Connection (GWFC), and Pardeep Khrod, marketing manager of Quest Food Exchange. Moderated by Annie Burkes, co-manager of the grant program at the City of Vancouver that supports the nonprofit social service sector, the forum also included remarks by Susan Alexman, associate executive director of JFSA.

Burkes described the forum as “a phenomenal opportunity ... to open a community dialogue about the role of the Jewish Food Bank generally in the context of the larger system of supports for some of the more vulnerable members of our community.” She shared the City of Vancouver’s system-wide food strategy, the five main goals of which were summarized on a handout: “support food-friendly neighborhoods” by providing “residents with access to healthy foods and ways to sustainably dispose of food waste”; “empower residents to take action” by developing “capacity and knowledge on local food resources”; “improve access to healthy, affordable, culturally diverse food for all residents”; “make food a centrepiece of a green economy” and “advocate for a just and sustainable food system.”

Stressing that food banks and emergency food-access programs are “one piece of a much-larger puzzle,” Burkes said that the purpose of the forum was “to start a dialogue about how to continue supporting the whole person, not just thinking about that one entry point of emergency, but how to support them in a dignified way, to think about bridging services perhaps, to think about the person in their entire context, and about solutions from a system-wide approach because ... the crisis situation is not sustainable.”

Alexman explained that, some 25 years ago, JFSA in partnership with Jewish Women International started the Jewish Food Bank (JFB) “as an emergency service to assist clients in the short term, to get back on their feet. Currently, the Jewish Food Bank is serving 330 people every month, that’s 210 households, providing canned and packaged goods, fresh produce, eggs and bread.” She noted of the food bank’s clients, all of whom have household incomes below Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off line, “Most spend some days every month without adequate food, and now rely on the food bank as part of their permanent access to nutritional food each month.”

The only food bank that provides kosher-style and Jewish traditional foods, JFB provides $57 of food per individual each visit, said Alexman. The food bank has a strong donor and volunteer support, she added, and it “currently relies on donor support for storage and refrigeration of food ... and this really limits our capacity to be able to broaden the amount of food we can provide and also the variety of food.” Other limitations Alexman noted included accessibility because the food bank is only open on Thursday mornings, it cannot cater to special diets and it cannot deliver to the outer regions of the city. On the positive side, Alexman pointed to the support JFB receives from local farmers and the JFSA garden, the produce of which is given to clients.

Reimer spoke about her own experiences of living on the street when she was young, and having to struggle to feed herself (as a vegetarian in particular), among other challenges. She discussed some of the political, bureaucratic and other issues surrounding access to food, and said, pointing to the handout that was distributed at the beginning of the forum, “If that’s the answer, I do want to tell you what we thought the problem was.... The three big issues that the City of Vancouver has been looking at are the issue of localizing [versus importing food] ... we’re also looking at food access, [as] we know that 15 percent of people ... will go hungry at some point during the day and that’s very heavily weighted towards children.... And then the third problem that that strategy aims to solve is waste. Astonishingly ... 40 percent of the food in Vancouver ends up in the garbage.” She described the city’s role as funders and convenors, “very much trying to figure out how to support the local solutions that make the most sense for people at the ground level in each respective community.”

Marcuse described the grassroots nature of GWFC, “a neighborhood food network ... with a strong focus on connection, building partnerships and relationship-building, which is fundamental to social change.... We focus a lot on capacity-building, on skill-building, education and with a priority on working with ... folks that are struggling, and what I like about the Vancouver Food Strategy is that it has a strong focus on food equity.” GWFC has a dozen-plus programs, including community gardens, food workshops, buying groups and information-sharing events.

Marcuse said that GWFC had partnered with Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. in an effort to fill in some of the gaps “in the literature around the evaluation of food programs and their effectiveness in actually meeting the needs” of clients. The research looked at some of the barriers to access, people’s coping strategies and other elements related to the use of community food banks. From dialogues with users, Marcuse said that there were a lot of people with serious health problems and, therefore, it was of great importance to provide fresh produce, meat and dairy products at food banks. Noting people’s resourcefulness in finding affordable food, but the time it takes, Marcuse said there was a lot of interest in bulk-buying groups or co-ops close to where they live. He also cited a need for better dissemination of information as to what community programs are available, especially to new immigrants.

Herrmann (and the other panelists) echoed Marcuse’s stress on the value of relationship-building and of knowing the people that the organization is serving as well as inviting the larger community to get to know those being served. With the mandate to “help people become less dependent and more independent of food support,” she said that SFB is providing healthier options than in previous decades and is recouping some of the food that would have ended up in landfills, which Quest also does.

SFB, which has requirements for people to become clients (including a means test), has a number of different programs that started as pilot projects, the ideas for which came from their clientele. Niche programs, such as vegetarian and non-vegetarian hampers and 65-plus for

seniors (that offers them more interaction with volunteers and different food choices), have helped SFB attract donors because of their specificity, as well as volunteers – SFB has a waiting list for volunteers, and there are businesses, for example, that allow employees to volunteer at SFB on paid time.

As are the other organizations represented on the panel, SFB is affiliated with a variety of food security and food-related agencies and programs. They have more than one distribution centre, which increases access, and they own their own warehouse, though Herrmann noted that it’s now a third of the size that they need, and they’re “struggling like crazy.”

Quest also owns its own warehouse, which helps it fulfil its mandate to “reduce hunger with dignity, foster sustainability and build community.” To do so, Khrod explained, Quest partners with two segments of the population, the one “that has the means to donate ... and then, of course, we partner with community organizations that have the clients that have these needs.”

Quest runs four not-for-profit grocery markets, the idea behind which, said Khrod, “is to provide a dignified shopping experience for the individual. They’re able to come in ... to choose their own food based on their dietary needs and preferences. At the end of the day, it’s giving them confidence to become economically self-reliant, and that’s really what our focus is ... we don’t want to see our clients forever, and we really want to see our clients transition....”

Quest also has a community training kitchen. In that program, a chef is paired with 10-15 clients, he/she goes shopping with them and, together, they choose (on a budget) the meal they want to learn to cook.

Finally, Khrod talked about Quest’s volunteer and training program “to give individuals the skills they need to enter back into the job force. We work with clients ... [as if it’s] an actual job, so they get practical experience. We get them to give us their resumé, we get them to fill out a volunteer application form, just how they would fill out a job application, we orient them and then, from there, we say, ‘OK, what skills are you looking for, and where do you want to end up?’ A lot of them need office skills, they need to polish up their computer skills, some of them want to work in our kitchen, some of them want to work on their customer-service skills, so we’ll pair them up into our not-for-profit grocery markets.” In exchange for their work, these individuals receive food vouchers, “and that’s been great in raising the confidence and the dignity of these individuals because we’re not giving them anything for free,” said Khrod. “They’re coming into Quest, they’re giving back to their community and they’re feeding themselves and their families.”

As for funding, Khrod explained that a $1 million donation allowed Quest to acquire one of its locations, and they own five trucks, three of which are temperature-controlled. Quest receives grants from the local government, corporations and foundations.

SFB must raise $1.2 million/year to keep going, said Herrmann, noting that “70 percent of our donations come from individuals.” Vancouver Coastal Health, the City of Vancouver and grants from various foundations help keep GWFC running, said Marcuse, who noted the amount of time he spends filling out funding applications.

To learn more about JFSA and/or volunteer, visit jfsa.ca/eventsandactivities.

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