Driver shortage threatens Meals-on-Wheels
Program delivers affordable lunches to 20,000 clients
Colleen Peacock can’t seem to give up delivering Meals-on-Wheels.
She began as a volunteer in 1983 when she was 16, going on to become executive-director of Mealson-Wheels East Toronto and manager of food and security check programs at Woodgreen, Toronto’s leading social services agency.
Now retired, she’s back to driving through town at midday, dropping off lunch for people house-bound by age or illness.
“You just get addicted to helping people,” Peacock said.
Her dedication to the role makes her a bit of a rare bird in this inflationary economy, as people who once volunteered their time and their vehicles are themselves struggling to make ends meet, according to Adriano Murarotto, director of seniors programs at Woodgreen Community Services. The service could use 80 drivers. It is making do with 30.
“There’s fewer and fewer people that can afford to run their vehicles and give up their time versus being paid for it,” said Murarotto.
Typically working in a team of two, a driver and a runner, Mealson-Wheels volunteers deliver a warm lunch to clients — mostly seniors, but also people who are ill or disabled — in exchange for a fee that ranges from about $6.70 to $14 for culture-specific meals.
Lisa Rae, director of volunteer and community programs at Circle of Care, Sinai Health, says the rising cost of food has forced them to increase the price of their frozen Kosher meals to $14 from between $8 and $10 in 2020. They currently deliver 250,000 meals annually to 1,100 clients.
Unless they can secure new funding, they will have to drop 30 clients from the Meals-on-Wheels program in June, when pandemic-related government grants are scheduled to end. They will be referred elsewhere.
“We don’t want anyone to go without food,” said Rae.
A Volunteer Toronto research report published last year found that 18 organizations running Mealson-Wheels programs in the city delivered 888,583 meals in 2022 to 20,621 clients. It also found that 28 per cent of organizations providing the service were forced to reduce deliveries due to the volunteer driver shortage. While they are serving fewer clients than they once did, they are serving existing clients more meals per week, the data shows.
Staff at organizations offering Meals-on-Wheels have been stepping up to help bridge the gap, which isn’t a sustainable formula.
“The current model isn’t working,” said Joanne McKiernan, executive director of Volunteer Toronto, which matches volunteers to organizations. One thousand drivers are needed to meet existing programs.
“We believe there will never be enough volunteer drivers to meet those needs.”
She said more government funding is required so that organizations can pay volunteer drivers more than the small mileage allowance they get now, or buy cars for volunteer use.
Meals-on-Wheels volunteers also perform valuable wellness checks on people who may not see another friendly face all day, said Peacock. They are the first to call 911 when a customer doesn’t respond.
“I really regret not keeping track of the number of lives that have been saved, because it happens all the time,” said Peacock.
McKiernan said the need is continuous — fewer people are sticking around for years, or like Peacock — decades — as they did in the past.
A 2023 report on the state of the city, Toronto Vital Signs, found that the volunteer rate had dropped from 37 per cent to 25 per cent between 2018 and 2022.
McKiernan said Volunteer Toronto noticed the trend in about 2017, and the problem has grown. It’s related in part to a recent overall decline in volunteerism that agencies can’t yet fully explain.
“The data is new — it’s still materializing into a trend,” said McKiernan, adding that there seems to be a concurrent increase in interest in one-off volunteer opportunities, like working at a fair or festival.
Jade Da Costa, Banting post-doctoral fellow, and co-founder of The People’s Pantry, a mutual aid food justice group, said her corps has dropped from a high of 200 people during the early days of the pandemic to 25. Her organization, which puts together people who need food and people who can shop for groceries, cook and deliver food, has had to stop accepting new requests in Mississauga.
“I think a lot of people associate food insecurity and food struggle and mutual aid with the lockdown or the quarantine era of the pandemic, and those who have the privilege to move on from it don’t really want to think about it,” said Da Costa.
The toughest spot to fill are the volunteer driving positions because being stuck in traffic is wearying.
“The driving is what accumulates over time and really burns you out,” said Da Costa.
Gridlock is definitely a barrier in Toronto, according to Peacock, adding that drivers have become more aggressive.
“It can be very stressful.”