FEEDING THE MULTITUDE
Volunteers at Fort York Food Bank get creative to meet daily demand
In the back of a small College Street storefront, four women are busy chopping vegetables, boiling hotdogs and making fried rice with dumplings.
It’s a cold November morning so they huddle close as they work, cutting cucumbers on a small cutting board, monitoring a pressure cooker and cooking eggs.
They work mostly on a single standard-size stove. The food bank has an industrial-size one, but the oven is broken. The demand doesn’t ebb despite that challenge. Volunteers feed up to 100 mouths a day, five days a week. “Two thousand meals a month is not unusual,” says manager Mike Schoonheyt, the only paid employee on staff. “One family probably has more cooking capacity than we do … There’s no handbook on how to run a place like this.”
The women are volunteers at the Fort York Food Bank and today they are getting ready for the day’s hot food program, opening the doors to the city’s vulnerable.
Reliant on supplies from the Daily Bread Food Bank, Second Harvest and community food drive donations, the volunteers get creative with what they have. The kitchen is stocked with boxes of carrots, beets and peppers.
There has been a lot of those this season, they say. So they try to mix things up for variety. Today they will serve a turkey casserole dish and potatoes with the standard hotdogs, rice and vegetables.
In addition to the clients who come in for hot food, up to 100 others — estimated to be from preteen to 95 years old — come for the food box program, four days a week, to get a box (“hamper” in food bank parlance) stuffed with three days’ worth of food supplies, though availability varies based on the season.
The food bank gave out 1,685 hampers in November 2018, and it estimates it will do the same this year, if not more.
The bank amps up its stock close to the holidays. This week, it’s stocked with cans of beans, peas and chickpeas, cake mix, cartons of broth and jars of peanut butter. There are bags of cornflakes divvied from boxes to go farther, and boxes of rice chips. There are three freezers to store meat; this week they are about half full, mostly with sausage and chicken nuggets.
Area businesses often drop off bags of food, like day-old buns. Meal service companies sometimes bring hot sandwiches and pizzas that didn’t make it to customers. They are special treats for their clients.
The only item the bank buys is milk. It’s in high demand and given out only after clients meet with a volunteer case worker to see how else they can help them.
Fort York Food Bank opened in 1998 and serves the catchment area of Dovercourt Street to Yonge Street, from Bloor Street to Lake Ontario. It rehomed to 380 College St. after having to leave its previous long-term digs in February 2018. The space is small but functional.
“My number one rule is that people get along,” Schoonheyt says. “Most of the world can’t do that.”
The food programs are at the heart of the operation but with help from Schoonheyt and volunteers, the food bank is able to do some advocacy work for clients, connecting them with information on support agencies and social programs for housing and government assistance.
The bank has a long relationship with the Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund, connecting its clients with the opportunity to get a decorated gift box containing warm clothing, a toy, book, candy and hygiene items for kids. The 114-year-old fund is a registered charity that provides 45,000 underprivileged children with a gift at Christmas.
This year, the boxes got a boost from Joe Fresh, which supplied T-shirts and socks. Its staff also volunteered to help pack boxes at Santa’s secret warehouse in October.
Countless Fort York Food Bank clients have received Santa Fund boxes over the years, a joyous surprise for some of the food bank’s youngest users.
One year, Schoonheyt recalls, “We had been broken into … and (the Star) knew we could use it,” he says. “Low and behold we must have gotten 75 to 80 boxes. We handed them out. It was really fun to see.”
“There were little toys, there were gloves, a little puzzle book … They were really appreciated. Anything so unexpected is really nice. It was a delight to see a lot of mothers and fathers get them and kids getting to open them up.”
The Santa Claus Fund’s 2019 fundraising goal is $1.7 million and 100 per cent of donations go to the gift boxes. The Toronto Star covers all costs. Donations are accepted until Christmas Eve, and every donor will receive a tax receipt in January.