The demand for the Friends in Need Food Bank is only getting stronger in Pitt Meadows, with more and more people struggling to afford adequate amounts of food, explained food bank executive director Mary Robson at the Oct. 29 Pitt Meadows city council meeting.
According to Robson, the number of households that were registered for assistance from the Friends in Need Food Bank in 2023 increased by five per cent.
This brought the total number of Pitt Meadows users up to 125 households and nearly 300 people who regularly utilize the food bank's assistance programs.
Of these 300 users, 37 per cent of them are younger than 18 years old, and another 20 per cent are 55 years or older.
"This upward trend that we are continuing to see can be directly attributed to the increase in the cost of living," said Robson. "There's just more and more families that are unable to make ends meet."
One of the ways that the Friends in Need Food Bank addresses this increase in demand is by expanding its fundraising efforts, which included the first-ever community-wide food drive in Pitt Meadows as part of the 2024 Purolator Tackle Hunger campaign.
Robson said that more than 9,155 pounds of non-perishable food was collected by a team of volunteers from Purolator, 1st Laity View Scouts, and the Pitt Meadows food bank.
Another food bank program that continues to expand is the Perishable Food Recovery Program, which takes unsold food from various Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows supermarkets and either distributes it to people in need or gives it to local farmers for farm feed or composting in the event that something is deemed not suitable for human consumption anymore.
The Perishable Food Recovery Program has been operational for more than five years now, with approximately 6.2 million pounds of food being repurposed and kept out of landfills.
"Because of the increase in demand with the increase of registered clients, we've become more aggressive in the trimming of what we're picking up," said Robson. "What we used to allocate more to the farms, we're now trimming more of that product because there's more demand for it. Where we were running out before, we're now actually repurposing about 70 to 75 per cent for human consumption."
"Without this program, we would not be able to provide the quality or the quantity of food that's needed. And it's fresh food as opposed to the canned products that we had been giving out previously in volume."
Thanks to a recent grant, this program now has enough funding to continue operating in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows for at least the next three years.
"In October of this year, the Friends in Need Perishable Food Recovery Program was awarded a grant through the community prosperity fund, which was a provincial government program administered by the Maple Ridge Community Foundation," said Robson. "It will provide funding for three years to support the operations of the Perishable Food Recovery Program, which itself runs with a budget of over $100,000 a year just to maintain that operation."
However, significant fundraiser is still needed to keep the other aspects of the Friends in Need Food Bank operational, said Robson.
She explained that the food bank receives no government funding and is 100 per cent supported through donations.
Most of these donations come through efforts like the Pitt Meadows Day parade, which raised $1,400 this year, in addition to events like the Firefighters for Families and CPKC Holiday Train, both of which will once again be held next month.
