Food bank donations fund an organization that was never supposed to exist this long. You're stopped at a red light. Four cars around you. One of those drivers doesn't know where their next meal is coming from. You can't tell which one. The first food banks in Canada wrote sunset clauses into their bylaws. Five years maximum. The government would solve this. Forty-five years later, 2.2 million visits happen every month.

Twenty-three percent of food banks ran out of food before meeting demand last year. That's not a distribution problem. That's a math problem. Eighty percent of food banks now purchase food to fill gaps, up from fifty percent. Your ten-dollar cash donation buys what costs you triple at the grocery store. Thirty percent of food banks run entirely on volunteers. Many of those volunteers are also food bank clients. They're working shifts between precarious employment hours, giving back to the system keeping them fed.

The system was designed to be temporary. It's becoming permanent infrastructure. One in four Canadians need it now. That's the baseline, not the crisis. The question isn't whether you donate food or cash anymore. It's whether you're willing to send five minutes of emails to elected officials demanding they address why this is still necessary.

Topics: food bank donations, food insecurity rates, volunteer opportunities, poverty advocacy, charitable contributions

GUEST: Erin Filey-Wronecki | http://foodbankscanada.ca

Originally aired on 2026-02-02