“It’s a nice way to start your day”
In last week’s edition of the Voice, we shone a spotlight on some of the volunteers and companies involved in the Winkler Food Rescue program, which collects donated groceries from local businesses and distributes them throughout the community. Here’s a look at a few of the agencies putting all that rescued food to use.
The school bell rings out over the grounds of Parkland Elementary School in Winkler, and the kids start to pour inside.
Before heading to their classrooms to stow their jackets and bags, most of them make a beeline for the canteen tucked in beside the main office.
There, teacher Ian Hart and educational assistant Taylor Cudmore are busy making toast (both the buttered and jammed varieties) and setting out fruit and, when they’re available, drinkable yogurts.
It’s a spread that’s offered for free to all students, staff, and visitors to the school every single morning.
“The thing I really like is it’s now open for everyone,” says Hart. “We’ve offered breakfasts for families that maybe have a little trouble providing in the morning, just for those kids, but now this year we have it out for everyone and there’s no stigma—you just walk up and take something if you want it.”
The Parkland breakfast program is funded by the school itself and, in recent months, a provincial grant, but being a recipient of the Winkler Food Rescue program operated out of the Central Station Community Centre and the Winkler and District Food Cupboard has allowed them to take things to the next level, says principal Mandy Friesen.
“Initially when we started it last year, the food rescue became kind of the most important part of it because it was a way for us to access what we needed to run it in terms of cost,” she says. “For them to be able to even supply the breads for us on a regular basis allowed us to only have to purchase margarine or jam and, initially, the toasters to make it all happen.”
Each week, Parkland staff fill out a request form with the school’s needs. Food Rescue volunteers then work to pull together those items, often throwing in additional products depending on what comes in from the local stores and restaurants who donate their unsaleable food (stuff nearing its best-buy dates or with damaged packaging but still perfect edible) to the program.
Parkland is one of seven Winkler schools that stop by Central Station regularly—Winkler Elementary, J.R. Walkof, Emerado Centennial, Pine Ridge, Garden Valley Collegiate, and Northlands Parkway Collegiate all also receive food weekly.
You never really know for sure what you’re going to get, Friesen says, which has given the kids the chance to broaden their palates a bit.
“They’re trying things like cranberry raisin bread,” she says, chuckling. “They’re getting adventurous.
The program has been so successful that Parkland has burnt out several toasters over the past year trying to keep up with the daily demand.
“We can get up to 20, 30 loaves of bread in a week,” Friesen shares, noting they’ve purchased a deep freeze so they can make the donated bread last even longer. “I think this year we’ve only had to purchase bread once.”
And it’s not just breakfast they’re able to offer—they also put fruit out in the office for kids to grab as a snack throughout the day (the recent provincial funding made it possible for them to buy fresh fruit more regularly) and have lunch fixings ready to go if a child arrives without one.
“It’s another way of being able to support them, and there we use what Food Rescue has given us as well,” Friesen says.
The strength of the program, as Hart noted, is that it’s not singling out any specific student or families. Everyone is welcome to partake, whatever their reason for not eating breakfast before coming to school.
“Not only do we know that we’ve got families in our school that need it on a regular basis, we also know that we have families that sometimes need it,” Friesen says. “Sometimes things just don’t go well in the morning, and that can happen to anybody at any time.”
She estimates about 40 per cent of the school population grabs a slice of toast from the canteen every morning.
“Breakfast is so important. With this, families know, every kid knows that they can come to school in the morning and still have something to eat, regardless of what happened at home,” Friesen says.
“It’s been a huge community builder for us,” she adds, noting the daily lineup “has everybody from K-8 in it, including staff members.
“It’s just been such a positive thing, and I’m just so thrilled that we can partner with Food Rescue and we can be that middle man for them.”
Down the street at Garden Valley Collegiate, chef Candace Hughes relishes the opportunity to get Food Rescue items into the students’ hands.
Every morning, Hughes stocks several rolling carts with fruit, cheese, crackers, cookies, yogurt, and drinks. Staff wheel them downstairs to the main foyer to greet students as they arrive at school.
“It’s a nice way to start your day when you’ve got an EA or a teacher welcoming you to school and then you can grab whatever you want to eat,” Hughes says, adding that the carts are pretty well picked clean by the time the first bell rings. “I go through about 10 boxes of crackers and cookies a day.”
A hot breakfast station is set up upstairs in the cafeteria so the teens can make themselves toast, and additional carts are parked at the top of the stairs to give latecomers a chance to get something.
“The kids just keep grabbing stuff,” Hughes says. “Some days it’s all gone by nine; some days it’s there until 10, 10:30.
“It’s providing something nutritious for the kids when they come in the door in the morning, no stigma attached. Anybody’s welcome. That’s my goal.”
As at Parkland, recent government funding has helped supplement the food they’re able to purchase for the breakfast program, especially fresh fruit, though the bulk of what they’re offering each day still comes in from Food Rescue.
Hughes has plans to grow the program with the addition of a breakfast bar in the student lounge.
“It’s going to be a permanent fixture and then that way I can stockpile it in the morning and the kids can head there,” she says. “I’m going to have a cereal bar and there’s going to be a fridge with yogurts and juices and whatever in there all day.”
Making sure kids are heading into their studies each day with full bellies, regardless of their home situation, is what it’s all about, Hughes says, noting some students, including those who very much needed it, were hesitant about accessing the free food when they first started offering it.
“But we’ve made it so welcoming—like, this is all yours—that now they just come and grab something and I get a ‘Good morning’ and I get smiles, and to me that’s the most important thing,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on in their lives, but if I can get them a little smile in the morning, get them a little bit of food in their belly, that makes for a better day.
“We can’t do it without the support of the community. We really, really couldn’t do this,” Hughes stresses. “It’s amazing what they’re doing for us as a school.”
“It’s a blessing”
While the school breakfast programs are regular beneficiaries of Food Rescue, they’re certainly not the only ones.
Central Station Community Centre kitchen coordinator Marian Hildebrand says the food they receive from the program helps them feed countless people every week.
“We use a lot of food rescue on Wednesdays,” she shares. That’s the day the Winkler and District Food Cupboard is open weekly. “When food cupboard clients come in on a Wednesday to receive their food, we provide them a hot breakfast and a hot lunch, and a lot of the food that we use is from Food Rescue.”
Without that boost of extra groceries, they likely wouldn’t be able offer such a varied menu of items as they do.
“We try to make sure we have one protein, one dairy, one fruit,” Hildebrand says, “and we’re able to accomplish that with the help of Food Rescue.”
She explains that they aim to create a welcoming atmosphere for the people coming to use the food bank, giving them a place to sit down, eat, and chat with others as they wait their turn.
“Food creates community,” she says.
Hildebrand pops in regularly as the Food Rescue volunteers are sorting any given day’s haul, and she’s often wowed by what’s all coming in.
“Every time I come back here they probably get tired of me saying, ‘It’s like Christmas,’” she says. “You never know what you’re getting, and sometimes the sheer quantity or the items that have come in, it just blows my mind away.
“It’s food that is still really, really good to use, and I’m really grateful that we are so close to the Food Rescue that we can see what’s coming in and plan our Wednesday menu accordingly.”
They also use rescued food in some of their other programming, including the weekly community meal and their breakfast/snack bar, which is stocked with food for visitors to the community centre to access all day long.
“Without Food Rescue, we probably wouldn’t be able to offer that service,” Hildebrand says of the grab-and-go food.
“It’s a blessing to be able to partake of it,” she says of the program, adding it helps them stretch their funds as they work to support people in need and build relationships in the community.
“We take whatever they’ll give us”
Another recipient grateful for the help of the Food Rescue program is Genesis House, the regional shelter for the victims of domestic violence.
Damaris Dueck heads up the shelter’s kitchen operations. She stops by to pick up rescued groceries about once a week.
“We take whatever they’ll give us,” she says, noting she often returns to the shelter with at least a couple overflowing boxes, and sometimes more. “It really does help out, and I really appreciate it.”
In addition to bread, dairy products, and, on occasion, meat, they also get the opportunity to stock their shelves with some comfort food—chips, cookies, and whatnot—that are lower priority when working with a tight budget.
“The things that we’re looking for often have to do with who’s in the shelter,” observes executive director Ang Braun. “So if we have kids in the shelter that are going to school and would be needing to bring a lunch, like individually packed lunch type things, then she would grab those kind of things.”
The shelter has five bedrooms that can house women and children fleeing abusive situations. Guests have access to the kitchen to prepare food and snacks, and Dueck also makes meals for the entire group.
Genesis House also passes along some food to clients who are staying in transitional housing or elsewhere in the community, to help them get on their feet as they leave an abusive relationship.
“We keep a bit for ourselves here, but a lot of the time we pass it on to people that we’re seeing in counselling,” Braun says, noting it’s the Food Rescue program that allows them to do that at all. “It’s fairly strict as far as our budget that we get from the province. We have to be careful we’re not giving away food that is earmarked for residential clients [and purchased with provincial funding] … but this [rescued] food that comes in has no restrictions on it. So when a person is moving out of the shelter, we can provide a kind of start-up package for them.”
It also gives them the flexibility to pull together a care box for a family in crisis.
“You can’t always predict how life is going to go,” Braun says, “so we do use some of that food in emergency situations as well.”
Seeing how much food is being rescued week in and week out has Braun grateful this program exists.
“It’s just astonishing,” she says. “And to see how much good use we can make out of those things—I’m just glad that this has started.”
Foods Rescue program coordinator Phyllis Kroeker says the relationships they’ve built with these and other community groups across the region helps them ensure the donated food is getting put to good use.
“There’s a real feeling of community and collaboration,” she says, stressing the goal of everyone involved is “to share stuff with dignity.”
If you’re struggling with food insecurity in the Winkler area, reach out to Central Station to learn more about accessing the food cupboard and other local aid programs.
Photo by Ashleigh Viveiros/Voice
