GLEANERS DELIVER
Food for First Nations
In the year that saw the Southwestern Ontario Gleaners crank out three million servings of dehydrated soup mix, the Leamington charity marked another important first.
A few weeks ago, volunteers packed up 10,000 pounds of fresh produce — including greenhouse vegetables along with 80,000 servings of dehydrated soup mix and apple snacks — and sent it to the Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario. The donation went by truck from Leamington to Thunder Bay and then to Red Lake before the food was flown into the First Nations community near the Manitoba border.
The Leamington-based charity — that gave its dehydrated soup mix through various groups to Haiti, three countries in Africa, eastern Ukraine and food banks in Windsor-Essex and Ontario — this year became the first gleaner group to send food to a First Nations community.
Some of the Sandy Lake children had never seen fresh produce like carrots and greenhouse cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, board chair Tina Quiring said.
A few green peppers in a store there would cost $23, she said.
“These are Canadian children going hungry on Canadian soil. It’s just so sad and so unnecessary,” Quiring said.
The Southwestern Ontario Gleaners, which got its name from the Bible where farmers were instructed to leave some of their crop behind for the needy, started slicing and dehydrating vegetables in 2014. It accepts donations from farmers of fruits and vegetables that would be thrown out and chops them up and dehydrates them to preserve them. It uses the vegetables to create a soup mix that is given away through various groups to the needy across the province and around the world.
The gleaner group is already thinking of expanding.
“It’s amazing,” Quiring said of how far the charity has come. “There’s a saying that there’s nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come and when I look at what we’re doing here, the time has come. The time has come for change — drastic change, powerful change.”
Vern Toews, fundraising chairman for the Southwestern Ontario Gleaners, said volunteers processed about three million servings in 2016 and 2.8 million of those have been distributed. He said that means more than 7,600 people got a nutritious meal at least once a day this year. They changed the recipe and added more spice for the soup mix that will be distributed in Ontario.
The group had so much food donated that it started sending fresh carrots, potatoes and peppers to food banks this year, Toews said.
It sent its sweet dehydrated apple snacks for homeless people at Street Help, gave fresh produce, soup mixes and apple snacks to Windsor-Essex food banks through the food rescue group Plentiful Harvest and gave apples snacks, carrots, potatoes and peppers to the Goodfellows in Windsor and Leamington.
“We’re committed to helping poor people in Africa, Haiti but also we really want to also make sure that we don’t neglect the need in our local food banks and First Nations,” Toews said.
The group is considering an expansion — which could cost millions of dollars — for more equipment and more space. Toews said it has local donors and would like to partner with the federal and provincial governments.
“We run our dehydrator flat out,” he said.
The gleaners have a fundraiser set for April 1 and the group is always looking for volunteers. Call 519-326-7687 for more information.