Dwindling donations and increasing demand straining food banks

Our Town Food Bank in Tottenham is struggling to keep its supply up with the rising need.

"We are seeing numbers that we've never seen before. It's an incredible amount of usage going on," said Robine Hawkes, president of Our Town.

The same cost of living increases that are affecting seemingly everyone are making food bank users even more vulnerable.

"We know people are struggling with affordable housing, cost of gas, cost of food. All those things are contributing to challenges with putting food on the tables," said Hawkes.

"The government helped out a lot of people during COVID, and they're not now, and it's really showing in the numbers that are coming in. We have already signed up more people than we did all of last year, said Dorene Lemire, the treasurer at Our Town Food Bank.

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And it's not just the demand that has been affected.

People from all walks of life are feeling it.

"It is also our donors. Our traditional donor base is just everyone that lives in the community. They're struggling too, so you start to see things going down," said Hawkes.

It's a problem right across the region.

The Simcoe Muskoka Urgent Needs Fund provides just-in-time funding in a micro-grant for people facing a crisis. It has already issued $50,000 in grants and estimates that number to climb to $200,000 by the end of the year.

"These are grants of only $254, so it puts in perspective the number of people we are serving. The estimation is that one in eight people in our community are experiencing food insecurity, and with children and youth, it's one in six," said Brian Shelley, the chief executive and philanthropy officer for United Way Simcoe Muskoka.

Shelley said the number one need by far in recent months has been food.

"Ultimately, families have to make a decision about paying the rent or putting food on the table. Paying their hydro bill or putting food on the table. Two of those options get you evicted so often families are going without the food," lamented Shelley.

Even the volunteer base at Tottenham's food bank has taken a hit.

"The seniors that were working when we shut everything down. They have not come back. We actually haven't asked a lot of them to come back. We are working on getting younger," said Lemire.

Hawkes hopes that the community, which has been so good to the food bank, continues to support it.

"We've always had lots of pasta. We've had pasta that could feed the whole community, and now we're seeing we have no pasta and no beans, so that's a really big indication of high usage and low donations," concluded Hawkes.