The Calgary Food Bank is forecasting almost 200,000 clients at the end of its fiscal year (Aug. 31), which will be an all-time high in demand. Workers suggest the majority of clients are first-time users who’ve recently been laid off.
“They haven’t had an income in the last 30 days,” spokesperson Shawna Ogston said. “The great thing is that when someone comes to the food bank and we’re able to give them seven to 10 days of food, they can get over that crisis and that hump in their budgets that they need some help with, and quite often we don’t see them again.”
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Ogston told Global News the food bank is at 130,000 clients already, with the same level experienced a few years after the 2008 recession.
“We’ve never seen a decline, we’ve just steadily increased,” she said.
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She said there were 141,000 clients in the bank’s last fiscal year, but there’s been a spike since then. The highest number of clients ever recorded was 146,000 in 2011.
“This time around, the jobs just aren’t there yet,” she said. “The recovery has been a lot slower, and we know we’ve got a couple of years down the pike yet to help individuals and families.”
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On the plus side, the shelves are full and Ogston credits Calgarians’ generosity.
“We have a 60,000 square-foot warehouse with 1,000,000 pounds of food in it. If we stopped collecting today that would last about a month.”
The Calgary Food Bank is also helping provide donations to evacuees of the Fort McMurray wildfire. Ogston said food will be transported to the Wood Buffalo Food Bank “as soon as they say they need it.”
READ MORE: Where Fort McMurray fire evacuees can get help and information
Over in Bowness, volunteers at St. Edmund’s Anglican Church food bank are thankful for all the donations they’ve received from the public.
“I sent out an email and said, ‘we’ve had this huge increase, we’ve doubled our numbers in January’ and almost instantly we had support coming in from all of the different churches in the Bowness community and various Anglican churches throughout the city and individuals coming forward with extra support,” said Linda Anderson, a volunteer with the church.
This past January, they handed out double the number of hampers they did in January 2015, and the need remains high.
“We have had individuals coming in who have gone through their unemployment insurance; they’ve gone through their savings and they’ve just reached the end of all their finances and they don’t have enough money at the end of the month,” Anderson said.
“We’ve had a lot of new people coming in who have never been to a food bank before. They are in our community and they are reaching out to us.”