| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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Views : 1275  |
 TORONTO - The 300 food banks across Ontario, most of them started by faith communities, are running out of food, money and volunteers under the pressure of a 14-per-cent increase in food bank use since 2001.
Almost 320,000 people in Ontario depend on food banks every month to make up the difference between their wages or welfare payments and the real cost of living, according to the Ontario Hunger Report 2007. The Ontario Association of Food Banks released the report Nov. 8 at Queen’s Park in Toronto.
Twenty-two per cent of Ontario food banks don’t have enough food to meet the needs of their clients, and almost two-thirds (64 per cent) purchase more than 10 per cent of the food they distribute because direct food donations aren’t meeting the need, said the report.
“We’ve broken through the threshold of what a community can provide,” said OAFB executive director Adam Spence.
The added pressure on food banks will likely increase given 122,000 lost manufacturing jobs in the last year in Ontario and an economy pooling its labour in low-wage jobs, Spence said. One in four adult clients of food banks have jobs.
While hunger in Ontario has increased since the first food banks opened in the mid-1980s, it’s largely the same pool of aging retirees who provide volunteer labour to stock the shelves and pack the boxes, said Sandy Singers, the Partners in Mission Food Bank executive director. Partners in Mission is a Kingston food bank started by the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph.
“That is a generational thing. It’s getting difficult to draw in the new retirees,” Singers said.
The old volunteers went through the Great Depression and Second World War, and drew from those experiences a sense of community commitment, said Singers. The boomer generation lacks that context when faced with poverty in its midst.
With their base in churches and social justice organizations, the food banks are also having trouble attracting corporate sponsorship and participation. While the churches and community groups commonly act by consensus, and engage in long discussions before charting a course of action, business partners find such long deliberations frustrating and time wasting.
“They’re not too interested in long discussions,” Singers said.
At the same time, increased and deepening poverty is the canary in the mineshaft of Ontario’s economy, said Singers.
“We can’t have communities with a high level of poverty and draw people in,” he said.
The message to all levels of government is that that volunteers and churches can’t deal with poverty all by themselves any more, said Spence.
“We cannot assume this task on our own,” he said.
Food banks will push the provincial government to introduce a full-scale poverty reduction plan with measures and targets before the 2009 budget, said Spence.
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