Food bank ‘districts’ deny some clients easy access
When Sara Woodill went to the food bank for the first time, this past April, she assumed it would be an easy enough experience. The food bank at the Orléans-Cumberland Community Resource Centre is a 20-minute walk her Des Forets Avenue home. She said if she strolls to the end of her street, she can almost see the food bank itself.
Instead, Woodill — a 27-year-old multimedia artist who had to drop out of Algonquin College’s game design program for financial reasons — was told she needed to go to a different food bank, in a part of the city much farther away.
“I gave them my address, and the lady told me that I was out of district,” she said. “I looked at her, confused, and said, ‘That can’t be right. I walked here from my house, and it only took 20 minutes.’”
It was the right policy: although she lived close to the district served by the Orléans-Cumberland food bank, she did not live within it. As protocol dictates, she was given half the amount of food and referred to her proper food bank, the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard.
To bus there, it would take nearly 40 minutes. The walk would be almost two hours.
“I’d have to use the bus, which I can’t afford,” said Woodill. “Luckily I do have roommates who are able and willing to drive me to that food bank every month. But if I didn’t have roommates who had a car, or had roommates who weren’t available one of the days that the food bank was open, I basically wouldn’t be able to go.”
Woodill’s plight highlights issues with food bank accessibility in Ottawa’s east end, where three food banks — two in Gloucester and one in Orléans — serve the entire city east of Blair Road, and it’s something the Ottawa Food Bank is hoping it can fix.
The core of the issue is rooted in the way food banks are administered. To manage where food is available across the entire system, the food banks operate in zones corresponding to your address. When the city amalgamated in 2001, many of the service areas for food banks and community services remained unchanged, and can now seem illogical to food bank clients.
Depending on your address, the Ottawa Food Bank may ask you to access a food bank that is farther away than another, or inconvenient.
“It’s historical,” said Erin O’Manique, executive director of the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard. “We formed in the former City of Gloucester almost 30 years ago, and took in part of Orléans.”
O’Manique acknowledges that those lines don’t always adapt as quickly as the city grows.
“The lines, they were drawn years ago. Things like bus lines have changed, and communities have grown,” she said. “In an ideal world we wouldn’t have any boundaries, but again, that’s the not the way it is right now.”
O’Manique said demand in the Gloucester area is large, and they serve a higher percentage of children than the rest of the city. She added they give out four days’ worth of food to families more than 2,000 times per month, equal to more than $12,000 in food distributed each week.
For the people running the food banks, Woodill’s concerns are not new.
“We know the problem exists,” said Nicole Perras, food bank coordinator at the Orléans-Cumberland Community Resource Centre.
She said access in areas of the city where there are large rural populations is particularly strained, since low-income people don’t always have access to transportation. She’s heard of people who travel more than 90 minutes each way by bus just to get to the food bank. A better bus route, she said, “would resolve a big problem.”
Rachel Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Ottawa Food Bank, said the agency is aware that the locations of food bank branches in the east end cause problems for some residents.
“It’s a huge area,” she said, adding that the agency is “looking at where there are some gaps” across the system and that they were exploring options to improve services there.
“That is one of the ones we’re looking at right now. We’ve got to figure something out with that area so that people don’t have to travel too far,” Wilson said. “It’s either a line redrawing, or we’re going to look at another agency we could partner with to fill the gaps.”
Michael Maidment, CEO of the Ottawa Food Bank, said new data technologies are making it possible
The boundaries that were drawn were drawn back in 1990, which is the year I was born. That’s 28 years out of date.
for them to better understand the way people move about the city and access food banks. He said the food bank is working with data from the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study to review their service areas.
“These catchments were set some time ago,” he said. “We just haven’t had the data that we now have.”
He said their organization is also implementing Link2Feed, a food bank management software, to generate further data to help understand the issues at play.
Woodill, though, said it’s odd the lines aren’t updated regularly to reflect the city’s growth. “The boundaries that were drawn were drawn back in 1990, which is the year I was born,” she said. “That’s 28 years out of date.”
It’s a problem felt particularly acutely in the east end. Other suburban areas, such as Kanata (which has food banks that operate outside of the Ottawa Food Bank network), see less of an issue with the way the lines are drawn.
“Gloucester/Orléans is one of the only ones that has this particular issue,” Wilson said.
She said, however, that any wholesale review of the way the boundary system works would take into account the entire system, not just one area.
Maidment couldn’t commit to a firm timeline, but said money is set aside to address the Gloucester/Orléans issue. He said the biggest factor they want to investigate more closely — and which hasn’t always been front of mind in the past — is the role of transportation.
“Transportation,” he said, “is the largest issue for someone using a food bank.”
O’Manique and Perras said they hope to see a solution in the next couple of months.
Woodill said she’s hopeful she will soon start a new job, and won’t need to use the food bank anymore. But for the time being, she depends on it and, because she is still registered with the Gloucester food bank, she relies on others for transportation.
“If I didn’t have my roommates, I’d essentially just be without food every month,” she said.
While those running the food banks are sympathetic, they too are being strained to some extent. O’Manique said stories like Woodill’s are indicative of a wider, more systemic failure.
“The biggest problem is poverty, and that our society has determined that it is OK for some people to be food insecure and need to go to food banks. Small charities like us are left to pick up the slack when public policy fails.”