For 40 years, the Regina Food Bank has provided an important safety-net for folks facing food insecurity in the community.
“It’s the anniversary we never really thought we’d need to have,” said John Bailey, Regina Food Bank CEO. “We started out as a temporary solution to what’s turned out to be an ongoing challenge in our community.”
Bailey looks back at some of the food bank’s historical records and sees it really has changed in scope and the scale of work.
“Starting in in the basement of a rented centre … moving to a full-scale warehouse operation, getting tens of thousands of pounds of food out the door each and every day is really a remarkable transformation,” he said. “While we don’t want to celebrate the need, we do take a fair amount of pride in the fact that we’ve been able to meet that demand for 40 years and will continue to do so, as long as the community needs us.”
Throughout the years, one thing that has stayed constant is the overrepresentation of children and youth.
A change Bailey sees is the number of folks working full-time with the food bank.
“It feels good especially talking to the clients, person to person and making connections with them,” said Malave. “It’s really cool that we’ve been open for 40 years … but it’s kind of scary to think what it would look like in 10 years. There’s no sight to the of end of hunger and food insecurity.”
For 2023, 40 per cent of the people the Regina Food bank serves are children.