WELLINGTON COUNTY – Hunger doesn’t take a break when summer vacation starts at the end of June, but student nutrition programs do. It’s a problem the Community Resource Centre of North and Centre Wellington is hoping to alleviate with the launch of its Summer Snax Program.
The program is meant to fill a gap in nutrition services that happens during the nine-week summer break when food is no longer available to students through the Children’s Foundation of Guelph and Wellington’s Food and Friends program or donation-filled school snack bins.
Though it only just launched, it’s already filling up.
“Within a couple of days we were able to have almost 250 children and youth registered,” CRC executive director Alyssandra Kent said. “Considering how fast the program has filled up, it’s just showing there is an extreme need for the program.”
She said roughly a third of children in Ontario live in households that are considered food insecure, and the county is no exception.
The Summer Snax program has funding that will allow it to help 350 children, but Kent said the need is even greater.
Summer Snax builds on a pilot project the CRC launched last year in partnership with the Centre Wellington Community Foundation called Snacks in Packs.
The pilot provided families registered for the backpack program with two weeks of healthy snacks at the beginning of the school year when student nutrition programs were still getting underway.
The success of that program led the CRC to look for additional resources to expand it.
A weekend nutrition program similar to the Food4Kids initiative in Guelph was considered, but was ultimately dismissed because of a lack of space and resources to pack food on a weekly basis.
“For us it came down to capacity,” said Kent.
A summer nutrition program was a different story.
“This was another gap that we saw needed to be filled, and we had capacity to fill that gap,” Kent said.
Rather than putting food packages together on a weekly basis, food will be packed up twice over the summer period – once in the first week of July for the first four weeks of the program, and once during the last week of July for the last five weeks.
There are four pick-up sites in the county – the Centre Wellington Food Bank, Wellington County Learning Centre, Norwell District Secondary School, and the EarlyON Child and Family Centre in Mount Forest – and families will be able to pick up their boxes at the location that works for them.
The CRC is also recruiting volunteers, not just to pack up the food boxes, but also to deliver to families who aren’t able to arrange transportation, Kent said.
“Our county is quite big,” so having those people willing to make deliveries will help significantly, she added.
The food boxes will include a combination of shelf-stable items such as cereals, granola bars, apple sauce and veggie crackers – and fresh produce. Grocery gift cards will also be provided to help families get what they need leading up to the start of the school year.
“We do believe in [giving families] the autonomy to actually be able to purchase what their kids will need,” Kent said.
She said registration to the program so far has been largely referral-based.
“We’ve been pretty intentional about how we’re getting people to register … to make sure we’re reaching the most vulnerable people in our community,” Kent said.
Though it’s clear that there is a significant need for the program, Kent said the project almost didn’t get off the ground, because of a lack of funding.
“It was literally the week after we said ‘we don’t think we can do this’ that all the funding came in,” she said.
“It truly was a collaboration of leaders in our community,” she stated in a news release that explained in more detail the source of the funding.
In late 2023, Arthur-based manufacturer Agrisan donated $20,000 to the Centre Wellington Food Bank, asking that the funds be put toward a meaningful project in Wellington County, and hearing of Summer Snax, the company was supportive of seeing its donation go toward the program’s inaugural year.
“When we received the donation from Agrisan in January, it prompted me to think about how we could be creative, add to what we are already doing, and find other ways to get food out to people,” CW Food Bank executive director Curt McQueen said in the release.
“The Summer Snax program is an ideal new service to add to our community.”
The CRC was also successful in securing a $10,000 grant from the Rotary Club of Fergus Elora, the CW Community Foundation made a $5,000 contribution to the project, and a grant of $2,000 came from the Rotary Club of Centre Wellington.
“This project truly proves that we can make anything happen when we are willing to work together on a problem,” stated Kent.
She said this is only the first year of what it is hoped will become an annual program that will go on to help even more children.
“The hope would be to expand the program,” Kent said.
For questions about registration or how to get involved with the program, email Kent at akent@communityresourcecentre.org.
Information on donating and volunteering is also available through the CRC’s Linktree at linktr.ee/communityresourcecentre.
