Whig Community editorial board submission
Susan Belyea, May 6th, 2009
The opportunities for giving are endless. Food drives, volunteering, fund-raising dinners, charity golf tournaments; they all provide us with the chance to give of our time, services and money.
In my work with Loving Spoonful, we reclaim surplus perishable food from grocers, restaurants and farmers for distribution to meal programs in Kingston. These programs arose along with food banks in the 1980s as emergency measures to address a temporary social and economic crisis. They’ve never gone away. In fact, the need for these services keeps growing.
Meal program usage in Kingston has gone up about 40% in the past year. Everyone working on the front lines in the emergency food sector is scrambling to keep up. The staff in these programs – paid and volunteer – are amazing. The cooks are the Iron Chefs of Kingston, taking whatever ingredients are available through purchase and donation and creating nutritious and tasty meals day after day.
But the challenges are huge. The daily work of sourcing and preparing food, coordinating volunteers, freezers breaking down, sink backing up, and so on are exacerbated by sharp price increases in basic foods. And with the combination of funding cuts, cost increases, and a rapidly swelling clientele, food providers have to rely more and more on voluntarism and the private charitable impulse to get the job of feeding people done.
Thankfully, the people of Kingston come through time and again with charitable giving through a variety of campaigns. We truly appreciate your generosity. We couldn’t do it without you and so thank you.
But then what? As I drive around the city the question that I keep coming back to is this: how do we leverage this remarkable human impulse for charity into action for social justice?
If you want to do more, (and I know you do), the next time you arrive home from your charity golf tournament or from a food drive event, take one more step. Sit down and write a letter to your elected representatives. Demand that minimum wage be a livable wage. Demand that assistance rates rise to meet the cost of living. Demand an increase to the Canada Child Tax benefit. Demand universal childcare. These are the kinds of policy changes that will make a real and lasting difference to people living on low incomes.
We all deserve to live in a caring society. The culture of compassion has to exist not only in our personal desire to help, it must be entrenched in public policy and law.
