Donations still high but down slightly from pandemic peak at Aurora Food Pantry

December 16, 2021 · 0 Comments

It is a busy time of year for the Aurora Food Pantry – busy handling donations and serving community members in need as the holidays quickly approach.

But despite the Aurora Food Pantry hitting peak donations last year as the community grappled with COVID-19, although donations are still high, they are slightly waning this year, according to Allison Stuart, Board Chair for the Aurora Food Pantry.

“When we talk about donations, we’re talking about financial donations and food donations,” says Stuart. “Both are not as high as last year but the community continues to support the food pantry.”

Asked why she thinks there might be a slight downturn, Ms. Stuart says the experience of going through the pandemic has “made everyone a bit more aware of their own circumstances and the circumstances of people around them.”

“Donations are still higher than three years ago, but they are not as high as they were in the midst of the pandemic,” she says.

Demand at the Food Bank was “quite high” at the beginning of the pandemic, she says, but this levelled off as some government benefit programs came into the equation.

“Even before they were having an impact, people knew it was coming and that made a difference for them,” says Ms. Stuart. “I’m always touched and surprised by this, but most of our clients won’t take home what they don’t need. If they see cans of tomato soup on our shelves, they will say, ‘No, I have two cans at home. I will leave that for someone who needs it.’ They have the same approach to food banks overall. If they don’t need it, they don’t come.

“Our numbers did go down a bit at the height of the pandemic [with people taking advantage of the financial programs], but one of the changes is that it used to be about a third of the people who came to the Food Pantry came three times or fewer in a year and the numbers who came pretty well every month were at around 10 per cent. That is changing in the number of people who come fewer than four times a month has gone down and the number of people who come every month. For some people, it has become less of a temporary ‘just tide me over until’ thing. People are struggling to find that ‘until.’ It doesn’t alter how we’re going to support them, but to me it tells a bit more of the story of some of these challenges really getting entrenched and finding it hard to get out of them.”

Rising cost of food is a contributing factor, she says, as is the affordable housing crisis.

“You can sort of give up on food, but you can’t give up on housing,” says Ms. Stuart of the hard choices some families have to make between food and rent. “You have to pay your rent and everything else will suffer as a result and I think that is what we will continue to see.”

To help those in need in the community, some of the high-demand items currently being experienced by the Food Pantry include produce, particularly frozen veggies and fruit, canned versions of the same, and frozen meat for their new walk-in freezer.

They are well-stocked on the staples of dry pasta and peanut butter, but the Food Pantry asks that potential donors also consider culturally-specific food donations, including dates, eggplant, and zucchini.

Size 4 diapers are also a big item in need.

The Food Pantry asks that people check the Best Before dates on items before they donate. In recent months, some cans and jars that have come in expired before some of the student volunteers helping sort the items were born – and disposing of these items creates an unnecessary cost for the charity.

“When it gets caught, we have to put it in the garbage and we have to pay to have it hauled away,” says Ms. Stuart. “This often happens when people are moving house, but please check the items. It makes a huge difference to us.”

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter