It’s one of Kingston’s best-kept secrets: helping schoolchildren with their education by providing healthy, free food, one fruit or veggie at a time.
Every Tuesday morning an extra school bus pulls up to the front of a number of public schools in the region, but it’s not to drop off or pick up students. It’s to drop off food as part of the Food Sharing Project.
“We are so under the radar, in many cases parents aren’t even aware that we exist,” Tim Brown, Food Sharing Project executive director, said. “We provided food last year for 14,509 students in the public school boards here in Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, and that was a total of 955,000 breakfasts, lunches and snacks in the 10-month school year.”
On a weekly basis, the Food Sharing Project delivers healthy food to local public schools, both elementary and secondary, as part of a variety of breakfast, lunch and snack programs.
The schools can request from a list of more than 50 items, everything from fruits and vegetables to bagels and cereal, milk and cheese, tuna, eggs and tofu.
“It blows my mind the amount of green peppers we actually put out every week,” Brown said.
It works out to a full ton of food going out the door each week.
The Food Sharing Project is run out of the same space as the Partners in Mission Food Bank, at 140 Hickson Ave.
“We are complementary yet distinct, independent organizations,” Brown said. “We aren’t just a project anymore; we’re an organization.”
An organization that has been around since 1982 with a simple mission: “to provide nourishment for students to improve their readiness to learn.”
There is no cost to any student to participate in the food programs, both in the Limestone District and the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District school boards.
“The programs are delivered stigma free,” Brown explained. “So if you have two kids coming into the room for breakfast, one might be known by the teachers to come from a family where there might be some degree of disadvantage and the other one may not, but the one [student] won’t come unless their best friend will come with them. We treat them identically. Those kids get that food, no questions asked, to make sure that they’re ready to get on with their day.”
While the Food Sharing Project receives funding through the Ministry of Children and Youth Services’ Student Nutrition Program, that doesn’t mean Brown isn’t always looking for donations to help cover costs.
It takes $500,000 to run the Food Sharing Project annually. The costs are shared by a number of organizations and programs, like working with the United Way.
Behind the scenes, it takes a lot of co-ordination and volunteers to keep the Food Sharing Project running smoothly.
On Monday mornings it’s a flurry of activity in the warehouse, with 10 to 15 volunteers helping to sort and pack the food into boxes and then sort the boxes into flats for each school and program.
This happens between 9 a.m. and noon.
Then bright and early Tuesday morning a different group of volunteers, including a number of bus drivers, arrive between 8:30 and 10 to pick up the food to deliver to the 95 schools.
Brown jokes that he doesn’t need to go to the gym as he gets a workout helping the volunteers load the sometimes heavy, food-filled boxes from the skids into the buses.
“It’s all hands on deck. We have a total of 135 programs. There can be multiple programs within one school, and we have a total of 95 schools that we provide food to,” Brown said. “Any [public] school is invited to participate, subject to them adhering to our [program] regulations.”
Each school has to submit an order form by Monday at 4 p.m. so the food can be ordered for the next week and delivered to the Hickson Street location by Friday at the latest.
Doug Strahan, one of the Tuesday volunteers, has been helping deliver boxes for a number of years but has never seen the end result, but that doesn’t bother him.
“I believe that when we bring the food here, kids that need it eat it inside,” Strahan said.
For more information, to donate or volunteer, call 613-530-3514, email fsp@kingston.net, or go online to http://ift.tt/21btMjL.
jmckay@postmedia.com
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