Despite searching high and low, Leah Dyck says she has been unable to secure a new location from which to run her charitable food program.
After losing her job during the pandemic, Dyck decided to focus her energy on creating a new community initiative, Fresh Food Weekly, which provides food to those who need it. Her first delivery was in the first week of June. Dyck estimates that over the following four months, she received more than $50,000 of donated fresh food and bread items.
“That’s way more than I had ever anticipated. I was delivering to 267 low-income families every week, and I had a roster of about 20 volunteer drivers to help out and to help organize food. It was a really big operation," she said.
Dyck, who has been working full-time on Fresh Food Weekly, relying upon her employment insurance to carry her through, told BarrieToday the program had been running out of a Community Room at one of the Barrie Housing buildings, but was asked to vacate the space by Oct. 1.
“My last delivery day was Sept. 26 and, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a new space, and so I had to shut it down. I kept looking and looking and reaching out to everybody that I could think of, and still no luck,” she told BarrieToday. “I have had quite a bit of time to look around, but for some reason nobody was willing to provide a space.
"I need a big space and I need it every day, so if people already have programs running, they can’t give it every day.”
Running the program, she noted, was actually costing her approximately $1,000 each month in gas and food packaging. She simply didn’t have the funds to be able to cover the cost of leasing a space.
Dyck has created an online fundraising campaign in the hopes of raising $25,000, which she said would cover the cost of renting space to run the program for one year, but admitted so far it’s not going very well.
Not being able to run the program for the last few weeks, Dyck says she is already seeing a huge impact.
“Everybody’s EI or CERB is running out in October, so this month a lot of people are saying they’re having to pick between paying rent and buying groceries. The last week of deliveries, there was a family that had an eviction notice on their door and four kids lived in that house. … People are just really struggling,” she said.
“Even though this wasn’t giving them enough to live on, it was definitely helpful."
