Food to Share

Volunteers provides tasty nutritious meals to foodbanks

Food to Share began with the simple concept to take fresh produce donated by farmers or gardeners in the County and use that to make tasty, nutritious meals that would be distributed to foodbanks or offered at community dinners. Launched by Glen Wallis in 2015 with the help of $1,000 from Awesome PEC, Food to Share now provides well over 100 meals per week, cooked by volunteers at a number of commercial or community kitchens across the County, and even beyond. Volunteers have made copious quantities of bottled pasta sauce at the Ontario Agri-Food Venture Centre in Colborne.

Donna Young measures out a portion of freshly made soup at the Rick Hotson Centre in Picton. The soup will be frozen and distributed to foodbank clients.

Food to Share is one part of the effort to alleviate food insecurity in the County, and Wallis would like to clarify the role it plays in the bigger picture. “The real impetus for creating Food to Share was to get food from local farms, any excess crops in good years, that we could go and harvest or take off their hands and use it to cook,” he says. “One of the things we’re most concerned about is that people continue to use the local farm stands in the County. If farmers are not producing those kinds of crops, it will have a negative impact on us and a negative impact on the food system in the County. People have to understand that buying food from a farm stand helps the whole community.” County food producers have been very generous to Food to Share. In the fall of 2017 Wallis received over 20,000 pounds of vegetables that lasted through the entire winter and into the spring.

Volunteers with Food to Share cook the food at a number of kitchens in the County, including the kitchens at the Wellington and Picton community centres, and eventually at the Sophiasburgh Food Hub. Wallis points out that this is strictly a business relationship. The Food Hub is a commercial entity and Food to Share will be renting the space from them until a dedicated location is found. Food to Share was recently awarded a grant of $23,000 from the County, which will be used to purchase equipment needed for use at Sophiasburgh. That equipment will remain the property of Food to Share. Additional money from the County came after Wallis petitioned council to include a line item in the budget for the amount of $20,000 that specifically targets food insecurity. This was particularly important to Wallis. “I think that food insecurity should be funded in a way that allows the foodbanks, Food to Share and other groups to operate at a consistent level and to be able to plan, year after year, what they’re doing,” he says. Wallis compares it to the money set aside for affordable housing. “It’s the same idea, set money aside and as people come up with ways that money could be used, apply for it and use it.”

One of the major challenges that Food to Share faces is that the resources are spread out over a number of locations. There are foodbanks in Wellington and Picton, but neither has cooking facilities, so food cooked by Food to Share volunteers have to be delivered. The HOPE Centre in Picton and the Anglican Church in Wellington host community meals. Donated produce is stored at Loch Sloy, and cooking facilities are dotted about the County. “It all becomes a complicated web of people moving from place to place,” says Wallis

“It would be so much easier if everything was in one location. We don’t want to make things more difficult for people to get food, and we want to increase accessibility for people who don’t live in Wellington or Picton.” Wallis is working with the foodbanks and The County Foundation to determine if a centrally located foodbank with cooking facilities, storage space and a space for community meals is a feasible alternative. It would act as a central depot, and County town halls would be used as distribution points for food delivery to anyone who needs it. This could result in more flexible or even extended operating hours and help mitigate the problem of accessibility.

Currently the foodbanks, Food to Share and providers of community meals are totally run by volunteers. Wallis envisions all of it being brought under a single agency, possibly with a paid administrator. “It’s great when you have volunteers willing to run the show, but there’s burnout in a lot of these organizations. People are being expected to work as though they are paid staff,” he says. “There’s a lot of advantage to having a single-location model for the whole County. I know there’s a lot of people who are supersupportive of the foodbank in their own town, and it might be a hard sell to get them to understand that integration would be a benefit to everyone. In the end, it’s about helping people, and hopefully everyone will focus their civic pride about the County as a whole.”

Next week: Food insecurity in the County