Margot Baker is a single mom and also a full-time student putting herself through school. She’s on a fixed income but for 17 months she found enough money within her own family’s grocery budget to purchase food for the less fortunate and created the Abbeydale Little Free Pantry outside her northeast Calgary home.
“It’s a rampant issue in northeast Calgary,” Baker said on Wednesday. “We are sitting at the low end of the socio-economic scale, so there’s a lot of kids who are hungry and parents who are hungry.”
She’s involved her children in the process. Seven-year-old Taylor is learning how to help.
“It’s kind of sad [that] so many people don’t have food,” Taylor said.
“We were buying it for people who didn’t have any food to help them so they can stay alive.”
The family wanted to share what they could with their Abbeydale community and hoped to give these strangers in need the dignity to accept help.
But over time, she’s noticed the need growing, and nobody else was leaving anything behind. The free pantry would be emptied out the day after she would stock it with essentials and the cost of keeping it stocked was exceeding her own budget.
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Baker posted on social media in the hope of finding some motivation on how to keep the little cupboard stocked. Within hours it was viewed by tens of thousands of people and some have now been dropping off donations.
“I was kind of disappointed yesterday when I came home and saw it was empty and nobody doing anything,” Baker said. “I thought, ‘Does anybody actually care?'” Baker said. “I am amazed and humbled at the outpouring of people driving by, it’s incredible. Pretty great way to start the new year.”