On Wednesday, Georgian College students from the Barrie campus prepared and packaged turkey dinners — fixings included — for more than 300 homeless people living in Simcoe county.
“It means a lot to me to help everyone,” said student Skylar Reid-Shepherd in a press release. “My mom always says to help everyone in need and I think that’s very important — and it makes me feel good.”
By participating in the event, students were continuing a long-standing tradition. For close to 20 years, members of the culinary management program have been preparing similar meals during the holiday season. “We started doing this just because we wanted to give back to the community,” added chef Philip Leach, the program’s co-ordinator. “We’ve carried that on ever since.”
This year, students cooked about 136 kilograms of turkey, about 93 kilos of mashed potatoes, roast onions and other vegetables, 32 kilograms of gravy, 40 loaves of bread and more than six cases of berries, which were used to make cranberry sauce and crumble. The food was donated by several businesses — Central Supply Solutions, Stewart Food Service, A.J. Lanzarotta Wholesale Fruit and Vegetables Ltd., the Butcher Shoppe and Gordon Food Services.
“This is a great community learning experience, plus it creates awareness of what services are around in Barrie,” said Leach. “We hope the students get a good sense of the community and being integrated into a community. They’re giving back to make sure everybody gets a holiday meal this year.”
Some Georgian students are already familiar with the experience of going without enough food. On Wednesday, school officials announced they would more than double the amount of space used to run the college’s FoodLocker program in order to help deal with a record level of food insecurity faced by students.
Run by the Georgian College Student Association, the FoodLocker acts as an emergency campus food bank. While Georgian College community members are donating to it at record levels, they are depleting its resources at an even faster pace.
According to school officials, the amount of non-perishable food donated to the locker has increased by more than 50 per cent this year while the amount taken out of it has more than doubled.
To help prevent a shortfall, organizers are calling for donations of non-perishable food items as well as direct financial contributions. “Some of our most-needed foods include: rice, canned vegetables, canned fruit/fruit cups, dried beans, cans of soup, cans of beans, pasta and pasta sauce, canned tuna, ham chicken [and] turkey,” wrote GCSA officials in a statement.
The campus is not the only place struggling to deal with food insecurity. According to a recent report from Feed Ontario, which publishes data sourced from 1,200 food aid organizations, the province crossed a major food insecurity threshold for the first time earlier this year. In the 12-month period ending on March 31, 2024, more than a million Ontarians visited a food bank — a 31 per cent increase over the previous year.
Barrie mayor Alex Nuttall discussed food insecurity at Georgian College during an interview with the Barrie Compass earlier this month.
Whether it’s inflation or the job market or interest rates, there’s a lot of key pieces that are impacting how much money people have, whether they’re a student at Georgian College, a member of the public working hard to take care of their kids, or even seniors who, for the first time in their lives, are saying, ‘I can’t make ends meet now.'”
He added that, while it was important to recognize the problem would not be solved without provincial and federal intervention, the municipal government was working to keep the cost of living down for local people. “What we’ve been trying to do is to control taxation, to control spending and to bring forward a budget that doesn’t just doesn’t just just grow with the rates of other municipalities.”
