The Ottawa Food Bank received the largest single donation in its 40 years of operation.
Humanitarian organization Khalsa Aid Canada worked with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board to collect 15,000 pounds of food.
The funds were raised with the help of food supplier Italfoods, who were able to deliver £210,000 of food to their warehouse on Bantree Street on Saturday afternoon.
Volunteers and students formed a human conveyor belt to unload trucks full of food and carry donations back into the trucks so food bank staff could restock them.
“This is the first time we've ever donated this amount of food in one day,” said Rachel Wilson, CEO of the Ottawa Food Bank. “This means individuals can rely on their local food bank to ensure they have enough food to feed their families.”
This breaks the previous record of £182,000 set in 2013. This latest donation equates to approximately 420,000 meals that will be delivered to children in need as vital school breakfast and lunch programmes are cancelled over the summer.
“Thirty-six percent of our food bank users are children,” said Mandeep Singh, regional director of Khalsa Aid. “These are children who wake up hungry and go to bed hungry every day.”
Singh said this statistic is what inspired Khalsa Aid to try to break the donation record, but he credits the success of the initiative to the many OCDSB students who helped popularize the idea in the classroom.
“They collected food donations and had a picnic to raise funds. Many of the first grade and kindergarten students donated a dollar or two from their pocket money as part of the food fundraiser,” Singh said.
“I think it's a great thing that they're doing this to help those in need and help those who aren't as fortunate as they are,” Avalon Public School student Blake Mylett told CTV News on Saturday.
The day's event began with a speech from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being read to the crowd, and drew attention from city officials and dignitaries, including Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.
“We feel that with more door-to-door canvassing and phone calls, it will even be easy to break the world record next year,” Singh said.
This recent surge of optimism supports the food bank's goal of eliminating food insecurity in Ottawa by 2050, but Wilson says that can only be achieved through similar community efforts.
“The reality is that food banks in Ottawa or Ontario don't receive any provincial or federal funding,” she said. “We get about 98 per cent of our funding and food from the community. We really rely on the community and we hope they will continue to support us.”
