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Orangeville Food Bank faces sharp rise in usage

September 12, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

The doors at the Orangeville Food Bank are endlessly revolving.

Heather Hayes, the food bank’s executive director, said the numbers provided in its year-end update for 2023-24 are nothing short of staggering.

As of August 2024, the local food bank distributed 143 per cent more food than was donated. The service saw a 19 per cent rise in usage over the last year.

“The food going out to the community is a lot less than the food coming in by a good 30,000 pounds,” she said. “This will be the first year that I actually have to buy food, non-perishables, to keep the shelves stocked.”

The food bank’s non-perishable food budget has increased by 700 per cent. The purse to buy perishable food for the shelves has increased by 94 per cent.

“Those are big stats, ugly stats,” she said.

Thirty-seven per cent of the people who accessed the food bank are employed and there was a 37 per cent increase in food bank users who have mortgages.

“Because wages do not keep up with the cost of living and mortgages and rents are gutting people’s budgets right now,” Hayes explained.

Among single individuals who visited the food bank, there was a 109 per cent increase in traffic.

Those numbers translate to 554 households served in August this year. That’s more than the 465 households in 2023. Individual users totalled 1,462 in August 2024, up significantly from the 1,151 serviced the previous year.

In 2020-21, the food bank saw a decrease in users of four per cent. That’s compared to the user increase of 38 per cent in 2023-24.

When Hayes started at the food bank in October 2015, she saw just 380 monthly visitors. The food bank expects to see 1,800 people a month next year.

Those numbers show “stunning” increases, she said.

The food bank has a budget this year of about $1.4-million.

“That’s an astounding amount of money, which I never thought in all the time working at the food bank that I would have to raise,” Hayes said. “We’re getting close to taking pictures of my toes and putting them online, which is not attractive.”

Another staggering number: She said as many as one million people in Ontario are food insecure now.

All that paints a dire picture of how badly the provincial and federal governments need to do more against food insecurity.

“I’m not going anywhere soon because we actually are legislating poverty in this community and, in fact, across Ontario. Across Canada, actually,” Hayes said. “We aren’t making the changes that are necessary to feed the people.”

Food should be a right and not a privilege.

“Right now in Ontario it is a privilege for a million Ontarians,” Hayes said. “They’re never going to have that kind of food and that’s pretty gutting.”

There’s a need to reduce the claw backs on the money people earn from Ontario Works (OW) financial assistance. As much as 50 cents is clawed back for every dollar made after the first $200 per month. That effectively works as a barrier to work.

A single person on OW assistance receives $733 monthly to pay for shelter and basic needs. That’s in a circumstance in which rent has increase by 32 per cent since 2018 and the cost of food has gone up by 43 per cent.

But the financial assistance through OW has not increased at all.

“If I hear one more time that they (OW recipients) just need to get a job, I’m going to throw a punch at somebody,” Hayes quipped. “If you don’t have a house and you don’t have food, how do we expect you to get a job? It’s not practical.”

Right now, one of the hardest parts of her job is walking into the food bank and seeing all the people using the service look like her children, her parents, her neighbours, and her granddaughter.

“Kiddos are the hardest on me,” she said.

Another difficult challenge is lying awake at night trying to figure out how to get enough storage, enough food, and enough money.

“Because I will never look at a mother and say I don’t have milk for you,” she said. “That’s not okay.”

She’s also challenged not to use salty language when she’s presenting to provincial government staffers who tell her there are social programs available to help those in need.

“If there were programs for that, we would not be here and we would not continue to be talking about that,” she said.

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