Community Meal Program

Program description

Several of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) buildings in southwest Scarborough are located in a “food desert”. There are few grocery stores or permanent food banks in the immediate area. So even shopping for basic foodstuffs is a major challenge for tenants who are already living in poverty. This lack of access to food becomes even worse towards the end of the month when many tenants run out of money. It can even be life-threatening. So when a nutritious $1 community breakfast was offered by the tenants’ Social Club at 682 Warden Ave. beginning in 2002, there was an immediate uptake. In 2011 a $1 Sunday community dinner was added and in 2013 this was expanded to three community dinners per week. The small kitchen in the common recreation area only allows for the preparation of 40 meals at a time. The 40 dinners are ready by 3pm and are quickly sold out.

In April 2018 the MIND Program obtained funding from the United Way of Greater Toronto to expand this community meal program. This enabled us to hire two half-time community meal program coordinators to lead the cooking, shopping, financial management, recruitment and training of volunteers to work with them in a larger meal program. We continued the 6-day a week breakfast and dinner program at 682 Warden Ave. Then we started preparing 20 dinners twice a week for delivery to each of two TCHC buildings at 40 Firvalley Court and 10 Glen Everest Ave. Then in November 2018 we opened the kitchen at 40 Firvalley Court and are offering a low-cost breakfast on-site there three days a week. In March 2022 we expanded to a third TCHC building at 10 Glen Everest Road and now offer an on-site lunch there five days a week.

The community meals that MIND offers are available to everyone in the buildings. Tenants are served in the buildings’ recreation room which is an open, physically accessible, and visible space on the ground floor by the main entrance. We have found that it is very important to provide community meals on-site at low cost in order to be easily accessed by tenants. The cook and volunteers c reflect the diversity of the population in the building. The meals are simple, nutritious, and the food is familiar and commonly eaten by this population. We charge $1.50 for the breakfast sandwich and $2 for the lunches. This small charge, and revenue from the sale of snack foods, covers part of the cost of the meal ingredients. The charge is low enough that even those on the lowest incomes in the buildings have been able to afford it until recently. For tenants who have difficulty budgeting for the month between social assistance cheques, the MIND Program does help them schedule payments for the meals in advance so that this potential barrier is minimized. But even this modest charge is becoming difficult for tenants with the run-away inflation of 2022 and the end of Covid-emergency funds.

In addition to the daily and weekly meals, MIND offers free community meals several times a year for up to 450 tenants, usually around major Canadian holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. and these are fully accessible to everyone in the buildings.