Food bank use soaring in Manitoba

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This article was published 30/11/2023 (697 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Displaced Ukrainians made up more than half of the first-time food bank users in Manitoba this year.

A new report from Harvest Manitoba shows food bank use has continued to skyrocket in Manitoba as more than 50,000 people went to a food bank in the province every month this year — a 30 per cent increase compared to the same time last year.

When soup kitchens, school meal programs and other supports are factored in, a whopping 100,000 people received support every month.

As it studied food bank visitors for its annual Harvest Voices report, published today, Harvest Manitoba discovered that one in four clients was a newcomer to Canada — and 79 per cent of those were from war-torn Ukraine.

“Lots of folks that we spoke to during our surveying spoke about (how) they’re not going home to anything, their home is no longer standing, their significant other or their partner might be still in Ukraine. So when they arrived in Manitoba, they had nothing. So they needed to start from fresh,” said Meaghan Erbus, director of network, advocacy and education.

The 22,000 Ukrainians who have arrived in Manitoba since Russia invaded their country in February 2022 were automatically registered with food banks.

Serving nearly 10,000 Ukrainian newcomers monthly required food banks provincewide to provide additional resources, including intake forms and other materials translated into Ukrainian. Some offered resources to access housing and health cards.

“We realized right away that we had to lean on our community partners to help with this, just so we could do a better job of streamlining processes and making sure there weren’t barriers for folks as they came to our province or came to ask for help,” Erbus said.

At Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, it’s not uncommon to hear newcomers ask how they can access food banks. Often, it’s people who have settled into their new life and have used up the resources the province has provided, but are still struggling to find gainful employment, said executive director Yulia Zmerzla.

“They’re still looking for a job with little English, which is not that easy to find,” she said.

“That’s the problem, not because they are lazy, or they just want to use the service just to use it.”

Oseredok has held regular English language classes to help improve employment prospects. Zmerzla said 240 people have graduated from the program since it began in 2022.

The centre will hold a Christmas gathering on Saturday, complete with gifts for children in need.

“If people have nothing to eat, they require food banks’ help, probably children also need some kind of Christmas miracle in their lives,” she said.

Children account for nearly half of the users of Manitoba food banks.

As the cost of living has increased, so has the percentage of employed people who are forced to seek help from a food bank. This year, 40 per cent of Harvest Manitoba’s clients had a job at the time they used the food bank — a 66 per cent jump from last year.

While Indigenous people were underrepresented in this year’s report — 19 per cent of surveyed respondents identified as Indigenous, compared with 44 per cent in 2022 — Erbus said it’s likely the influx of Ukrainians skewed the numbers.

At Agape Table, a Furby Street non-profit that provides food hampers and daily bagged breakfasts, the demographic of users is changing, manager Dave Feniuk said.

“It’s a lot of the newcomers (and) it’s a lot of the new refugees, but it’s mostly the working poor,” he said.

Agape Table will hand out about 15,000 hampers this year — a “staggering” number compared to previous years, Feniuk said, that has forced the organization to stretch itself thin, at times.

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“We’ve been very fortunate. Manitobans, on a whole, are one of the most giving provinces,” he said. “But there’s more of a noticeable difference between the haves and the have-nots in Manitoba.”

Harvest has made eight recommendations for all levels of government, including boosting support to newcomers and implementing a universal school nutrition program nationwide.

“Time is of the essence,” Erbus said.

“Because at some point, when does a food bank, when you’re offering this sort of supplemental service until something else happens, say ‘We can’t do it anymore?’… I just don’t know what the future looks like — for us, or for the people of this report.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Harvest Voices

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.