Prior to the annual flood of donations during the holiday season, the shelves in the warehouse of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society were close to empty. (This photo was taken in November.) A representative says donations have decreased while demand has gone up.

Credit: supplied

NEWS: Food bank woes a reflection of troubled economy

The holiday season’s spirit of giving can seem like a boon for local charities, but a sad truth is that food banks rely almost exclusively on seasonal philanthropy to get them through the year. According to Doug Aason, community investment director for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society (GVFBS), donations spike over Christmas and tend to drop dramatically during the summer months, when use of food banks by parents of school-aged children goes up in the absence of school meal programs and the onset of increased financial burdens from summertime childcare.

In recent weeks, at least, the Strathcona headquarters of the GVFBS are busy, with Aason and his colleagues handling the crucial flow of November-December donations — the most generous influx the food bank will receive all year. But this past fall, before the holiday rush began, the warehouse shelves were emptier than they’d ever been. Overall, donations are on the decline.

“Demand is up, donations are down. It’s a pretty deadly combination,” Aason says. “And the situation this past year that has been one we’ve never seen before. It’s tremendously worrisome.”

What Aason has observed at Vancouver food banks is consistent with information reported in an annual report released in November 2009 by Food Banks Canada, which shows that the effects of the global economic recession that defined 2008 were strongly felt this year. According to the report, 72,000 people were first-time food bank users as a direct result of recession-related job losses and financial difficulty. As of March 2009, 794,738 people used a food bank in Canada, marking an 18-per-cent increase compared to the same time in 2008.

“The food bank isn’t the answer,” Aason says, adding that food banks in Canada started out in the early 1980s as a temporary solution for those struggling to make ends meet. “It’s just the symptom of a bigger problem... that hasn’t been addressed.”

Shuana MacKinnon, director of the Winnipeg branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, authored a Dec. 21 article titled “Putting the Spirit of Giving in Context,” as part of an effort to highlight how food banks fill a gap in society that governments should be taking care of themselves. Most troubling, perhaps, is MacKinnon’s assertion that food banks make governments and citizens complacent to persistent inequalities that cannot be addressed by seasonal philanthropy. “Unfortunately, public calls for charity donations neglect to draw attention to the inequality that creates need [in the first place],” she says. “The public is not challenged to consider the social and economic structures that have created the need for charities to serve the poor.”

Moreover, food banks and holiday charity drives let governments off the hook for issues they should examine more thoroughly, MacKinnon says. “Seeking donations to help the poor without providing context as to why we have so much poverty in a world of plenty allows us to individualize poverty,” she explains. “We allow ourselves to believe that [food bank users] are not like us — we would never be poor like them, but we will help them at Christmastime because we feel sorry for them, and giving makes us feel better.”

As long as food banks remain a permanent fixture of Canada’s charity landscape, MacKinnon says, governments will continue to shirk responsibilities in addressing poverty reduction. “The demand for food banks tells us that our country is failing to reduce inequality in a land of plenty. We should be outraged,” she says. “Our only hope is if provincial governments work together by implementing their own strategies and mobilizing public pressure to get the federal government on side.”

While Aason points out that the GVFBS does not receive government funding so that it can work independently to advocate for food security and poverty reduction, he emphasizes the role that food banks play in filling poverty gaps that governments leave behind. “Really, we’re there as a result of certain things failing in our system,” he says. “All of us here would love to be out of business and see people getting access to food that [they] need, and having a livable wage and affordable housing and a vibrant economy. But... 27 years ago, this was just a temporary thing that was set up to deal with a difficult economic downturn.”