Hungry? So are many others…Just ask the Food Bank

Last week I visited the kind folks at the Greater Vancouver Food Bank and learnt some troubling facts about how many people are going hungry in our fine city. In fact, each week 25,000 Vancouverites visit the Food Bank and 10,000 of those are children. It’s shocking to me that without the Food Bank, each week 10,000 children would go hungry in a city as wealthy as ours.

Even more troubling is that in my tour of the warehouse I saw that the shelves of the Food Bank are bare. This is because even though across Canada Food Bank visitors are up 20 per cent, donations are down 40 per cent because of the recession. Furthermore, many people don’t know that summer and back-to-school are the busiest times for the Food Bank, as parents have the extra expense of summer activities and new school supplies, but it’s also the time when the Food Bank gets the least amount of donations.

Want to help in the fight against hunger? Join us at the Vancouver Public Library on Oct. 3rd from 9am until noon. We’ll be exchanging a free organic breakfast for non-perishable food items and monetary donations for the Greater Vancouver and Richmond Food Banks.

Some awesome local companies have also joined in this Food Drive including, Olympic Dairy, Ethical Bean Coffee, Enterprise Paper, Soyaworld, VanCity and Happy Planet Juice.

Kylie McMullan is an Account Executive at Nature’s Path and a Panda Puffs addict.