Co-op works on ensuring access to ‘basic needs’
Program aims to tackle high rates of food insecurity in African community
Two years ago, Iris Manzano started a job as a support worker in Edmonton helping African and Spanish-speaking immigrants adjust to life in Canada.
Many of those families faced a host of challenges — raising kids, and finding work, health care, and social supports in a new country. But Manzano started to notice one problem looming over the others — the families didn’t have food.
“It’s one issue after another, and the main issue is poor nutrition,” said Manzano, who works for Multicultural Health Brokers (MCHB), an Edmonton co-op. “That’s the main thing, the main need of these families. It’s basic needs, the bottom of the line.”
Manzano’s experiences helped inform a new food program targeted at the city’s most precarious newcomers — particularly expecting mothers — who regularly skip meals or go days without eating.
Grocery Run, a partnership between MCHB and the University of Alberta that launched around a year ago, takes food that would otherwise go to waste or into dayold bins and puts it in the hands of hungry newcomers.
Much of the food goes to families from Edmonton’s northeast Africa community, many of them former refugees, who experience some of the city’s highest levels of food insecurity.
The Multicultural Health Brokers was launched in the early 1990s to identify populations that were socially isolated and not being well-served by the health-care system. One early success was connecting Chinese immigrants to free prenatal programs. Recently, the big issue has been tackling food insecurity.
On Thursday morning, a dozen women in the basement of the Old McCauley School, 9538 107 Ave., fill clear plastic bags with vegetables, bread and other staples from a table packed with cardboard boxes of donated food.
Maira Quintanilha, a PhD student at the University of Alberta who helped organize the program, initially hoped to work with co-op clients on nutrition during and after pregnancy.
But instead of helping expecting mothers choose the best foods to eat while pregnant, she found women who needed food, period.
A survey she conducted of 213 families found that in the past year, 85 per cent didn’t have enough money to pay for balanced meals. Thirty-one per cent said their children had gone a whole day without eating.
Food insecurity rates were especially high among people from northeast Africa, including Somali, Sudanese, Eritrean, and Oromo families.
Many arrived in Canada as refugees and lack family and community support structures, she said.
“They lose that when they move to a refugee camp or later on to Canada,” she said. “This organization is able to provide, or kind of imitate or mimic, what they had in terms of support there.”