Food insecurity

Though its doors closed in May of last year, one of Halifax’s historic parishes has reopened with a new purpose, offering a warm welcome to the city’s most vulnerable through a temporary basement homeless shelter.

For the hungry and needy of Toronto’s Parkdale community, St. Francis Table has been a beacon of hospitality, and over the past 20 years, a service kept alive through the care of Br. John Frampton.

Thanks to food security grants totalling $750,000 from ShareLife, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Toronto and a generous anonymous donor, 34 food banks or meal programs received a welcome and timely financial boost.

A new report shows 26 per cent of 1,515 Canadian adults polled indicate they are “extremely concerned about having enough income to cover their basic needs,” with seven per cent of respondents saying they have had to turn to food banks, food hampers or community meal programs, up from six per cent in October 2023.

Fed up with the growing food insecurity they see each day, chefs are teaming up with young cooking students to tackle the issue in Toronto with “Get Fed Up 2024.”

While it might seem a good-news story that Good Shepherd Ministries served more than 1,200 meals to hundreds of grateful guests on Easter Sunday, it merely highlights a staggering trend in the rise of food bank usage in Toronto and beyond.