Rooted in community.
Our food bank has deep roots in our local community. Every week we work with private donors and local businesses to stock our shelves and help feed people.
Our food bank has deep roots in our local community. Every week we work with private donors and local businesses to stock our shelves and help feed people.
We have volunteers assigned to drive our regular pick-up route. We receive donations from businesses such as The Village Store, Tait’s Fresh Start, Starbucks Brockville, and all the major grocery stores: Metro, Food Basics, Superstore, Walmart, Giant Tiger.
On a typical week, we purchase and pick up around 700 pounds of food from our suppliers – local grocers and warehouses. These include various meats, canned goods, pantry items, dairy and eggs.
We collect on average 900 pounds of donated food each week from local grocery stores and other retailers. They often include various items such as meat, dry goods, pet food, snack items, canned goods, personal hygiene products and more.
There are five donation boxes located in grocery stores and in the community. We are available on call Tuesday to Friday to pick up donations as requested.
Remember – our food collection operations are 100% volunteer powered!
We can also pick up from individuals in the community upon request.
Our volunteer team sorts through all the items, checking for:
Any food that is not suitable for human consumption must be discarded.
If we have a large amount of one type of food with the expiration dates in the near future, we place them in The Giving Shed to be picked up by visitors.
All food items are grouped by type – all brands of tomato soup on one shelf, all the crackers on another. The food in the warehouse is eventually moved onto the food bank shelves for our volunteers to fill food orders.
We provide a five-day supply to each visitor (family or individual) each month. Once a year, they can have an additional visit, meaning a maximum of 13 visits to our food bank annually.
Along with distributing food to individual visitors, we also distribute food to local agencies who provide emergency food. Some of these partner agencies are:
The Brockville and Area Food Bank is proud to partner with these organizations, and we are open to supporting other similar projects in the future.
We also accept delivery of food supplies from our supporter Feed Ontario, and then distribute them to our partner food banks like The South Grenville Food Bank and the Gananoque Food Bank.
There are so many generous donors in the community who donate groceries to us. However, we cannot rely on donated goods alone to feed hungry people.
There are certain food items that we consider to be “staples,” like:
These are the kind of items we frequently purchase. The good news is that we make your financial donations go a long way. For every $1.00 in donations, we can buy about $4.00 retail worth of groceries. We are able to buy in bulk and negotiate the best prices from our suppliers. The major grocery stores in our areas are incredibly supportive and frequently raise money for us. It’s important to us to spend donated funds in our community. That’s why we buy as much as we can from local retailers.
In the event of a declared emergency/natural disaster, we can increase our service to help those in the community who are impacted by the temporary situation. Our close relationship with our suppliers allows for a quick and nimble increase in food purchases. We hold a financial reserve to enable us to purchase grocery gift cards to distribute if we can not access our food supply. Our social outreach program and long-time standing in our community means we are a trusted partner for emergency relief. We can accept donations work with partner agencies to fulfill our mission of having a hunger free community.
We act as advocates for local residents experiencing hunger and other issues. We consult with local
politicians to discuss social change and educate the community about poverty, social change and core issues leading to poverty.
We are open to new partnerships to decrease hunger in our community. If you are working on related social issues in our region, please reach out to us by emailing our
Executive Director.
