Rotary Improves Access to Emergency Food in Calgary
Franco Savoia
Our Rotary Club collaborates with others on improving access to emergency food. Food insecurity is a huge challenge in our community after the pandemic. A report released this past year has Alberta having the highest level of food insecurity in Canada.
Read more to find out what our Club is doing about it.
Food insecurity is a huge challenge in our community after the pandemic. A report released this past year has Alberta having the highest level of food insecurity in Canada.
In the summer of 2020, our Rotary Club convened some providers of emergency food in our city that we and other clubs had supported.
As food is a lever of change in Enough for All, Calgary’s poverty reduction strategy, Vibrant Communities Calgary(VCC), commissioned a study on the state of emergency food in our city. The Canadian Poverty Institute at Ambrose U conducted the study.
The report was released in the spring of 2021. One of the findings outlined the fragmentation in the delivery of emergency food: more than one hundred providers all having their own approaches and eligibility criteria. This made accessing emergency food by Calgary’s most vulnerable difficult. One of the recommendations was the need for greater coordination.
Rotary and VCC formed a committee to focus on finding ways of greater coordination. A number of Rotary Clubs were represented on the committee. The committee convened 3 community conversations with emergency food providers.
The notion of a “one refrigerator door” was identified. Further discussions and considerations led to the concept of creating an emergency food app. An emergency food app project with a budget of $80,000 was finalized in February 2023. As this was a collaborative, a charitable fiscal agent was needed. NSTEP assumed that role. Technology Helps agreed to be the developer of the app.
Our Major Donations Committee reviewed the emergency food app proposal in March 2023 and recommended to the Board to support the project with a $25,000 grant contingent on all the monies being secured. The Calgary West Rotary Club followed by contributing $10,000. The United Way then provided $25,000. And a week ago, the Calgary Foundation provided the final amount. The full budget has now been confirmed and the project is able to get underway.
This initiative has earned Rotary a place on Food Collaborative YYC, a network and collaborative, focused on convening the various stakeholders such as the Food Bank, AHS, the City, the United Way to focus on both the “immediate needs” of emergency food and finding system solutions to increasing food security.
Collaborations take time but in the long run can be more sustainable.
For more information contact, fsavoia@shaw.ca