Food insecurity reports the growing number of working people who need access to food

I work in a British Columbia, Canada, food bank. We’re serving triple the number of people we used to.

Thank you to David Long for writing this article!

Echo article reported by David Long, in MACLeans Magazine- the Magazine of Canada.

For the first time, many of our clients are people with jobs who can’t keep up with the cost of living. How did we get here?

About six months ago, a young single father came to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. He was working full time, but his rent had gone up 20 per cent and he just couldn’t make ends meet. Unable to adequately feed his children, and with no other choice, he came to us. He was distraught. Like many people, he felt the stinging stigma of accepting charity, of asking for something as basic as food.

This is not an isolated or extreme case. It’s entirely typical, in fact, of the 17,000 people we currently serve each month at the GVFB. Last year, we gave out eight million pounds of food. And we’re not the only organization with such staggering numbers. We’re seeing similar situations at food banks all across Canada, as well as in New York, in Houston, in Mexico, in the U.K. In March of last year, there were nearly 1.5 million visits to food banks across Canada, the highest March usage on record. It was 15 per cent higher than the previous year, when we were in the teeth of the pandemic. Our colleagues at the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto say demand for their services is absolutely frightening—more than 270,000 visits in March, compared to 65,000 per month before the pandemic. According to a recent report from Food Banks Canada, food bank usage is up 35 per cent from 2019, and one in seven clients is employed. Our base of lower-income donors has eroded, and some of them have even become food bank users.

Greater Vancouver Food Bank

We’ve had to grow into a massive operation to accommodate all this demand. We have a paid staff of 65 people and rely on a legion of volunteers—last year they put in 65,000 hours. Our operating budget has grown past $30 million, and almost all of our funding comes from donations. Since the pandemic, we have received some federal grants, but they cover a small percentage of our overall budget. 

In fact, next year I will spend $8.5 million buying food for our clients. We distribute food in two different ways: directly to our clients at our distribution hubs (this accounts for 60 per cent of our outbound food this year) and indirectly through community agency partners like women’s shelters, after-school programs and soup kitchens on the Downtown East Side. We supply them with food once a week to carry out the meal programs they run. Since I started, we’ve gone from 74 agency partners to 139.

Our clients have changed as well. Food banks have traditionally fed the working poor, people on social assistance, people with disabilities—the most impoverished and vulnerable members of our society. But in the last few years, we’ve seen many people who are working full time and still can’t make ends meet. People who are earning $40,000 or $50,000 per year and, after they pay their bills, there’s just nothing left. We register new client families where the parents have been skipping meals so their children can eat.

We see retired teachers and nurses—people you think would have great pensions that they can live off for the rest of their lives. 

We supply a food bank at the University of British Columbia, which provides food for 450 people a week. It’s horrifying. International students are among the most frequent users of food banks across the country, and they pay much higher tuition fees than domestic students. In an economy like this, their funds erode faster than anticipated. And so we have these students who haven’t eaten in days, sitting in class trying to study. It’s just wrong. They’re tired of the situation they find themselves in, fed up with living in chronic poverty.

Where does this go, and when does it stop? 

When I became CEO of the organization in 2019, we were supporting 6,500 clients per month. That number has nearly tripled in just five years. What’s going to happen in another five years’ time? That’s what keeps me up at night. People often say that food banks are just a Band-Aid solution. My colleague Alex Boyd of the Greener Village food bank in Fredericton put it much better: we’re not a Band-Aid, we’re a tourniquet.