Single-parent families in Etobicoke will not have to worry about struggling to eat for the next six weeks.
The New Neighbourhood Table @ Home program, which runs from Feb. 10 to March 17, aims to deliver fresh food to 65-75 families once a week.
Eunice Hogeveen, the coordinator for the program at St. Philip’s Lutheran Church, said that the human connections that are made are integral.
“It is a sense of making an impact and having a positive effect in somebody’s life which is obviously a very satisfying feeling,” Hogeveen told Humber News.
“Over the course of an eight-week period, especially with COVID, there’s really only a chance for very short exchange but our volunteers always say that the most rewarding part of the whole program is just that weekly connection,” she said.
The program, running out of the Etobicoke church at 61 West Deane Park Drive, received a grant from the United Way of Greater Toronto worth $37,500 which must be spent by the end of March.
The grant, which is distributed by the federal government, will cover about 80 per cent of the program’s costs.
Even with the extra financial support, difficult decisions still need to be made.
Pastor Tuula Van Gaasbeek said that the hardest part of the initiative is not being able to help everyone who needs it.
“Once people find out that we are the headquarters of the program, we start getting phone calls from people that would like to be included in it. Cutting people has been really difficult,” she said.
The church partners with two community organizations: the Arab Community Centre of Toronto and Polycultural Immigrant and Community Services.
“Both are settlement agencies and they have the capacity to know who the people in most need are,” Van Gaasbeek said.
The program, which now runs its food workshop virtually, began in 2018.
It initially had an in-person component where families could come into the church, learn about cooking and partake in a shared meal at a long table, hence the title Neighbourhood Table.
“When COVID happened, we had to pivot and then it became a Neighbourhood Table @ Home,” Van Gaasbeek said.
The virtual version of the program still offers the same feel. Recipients can join in through Zoom to learn about meal preparation.
“There’s demonstrations of the recipes that were in their delivery kits and a chance for a q & a,” Hogeveen said.
“They tend to run 30-40 minutes with that background and demonstrations and a chance to talk about people’s own experiences with trying the recipes,” she said.
The future of the program looks to incorporate a stronger sense of community, such as being able to share in the process from the beginning by growing food.
“We’d like to evolve,” Hogeveen said.
“We also have quite a bit of property at the church and so the idea of community gardens or partnering somehow with urban farms so that we can start the whole food literacy and healthy eating at the growing stage, and that sense of connection to the food and where it comes from,” she said.
Drivers are needed for the program. Anyone interested in volunteering can reach St. Philip’s at 416-622-5577.