Feed NS spends three times annual budget during COVID

When COVID-19 began in March, Feed Nova Scotia had to change their game plan to get food to vulnerable Nova Scotians pretty quickly.

“From day one as soon as the public health directives came out around social distancing and people staying at home, we lost about 150 volunteers a week,” says Executive Director Nick Jennery.

In the first week, volunteers were sent home to protect their health. But the organization still needed hands to pack crates of food for delivery to its 140 food banks across the province.

“We would normally ship out about 20,000 pounds of food out to all those organizations and help them as they reach out to people in need,” Jennery tells NEWS 95.7’s The Todd Veinotte Show.

So Feed NS contacted the department of community services, asking for employees who would help. Jennery says they had a “quintessential” Nova Scotian response, and came to help out right away.

“People came out, that was really terrific. And so we moved from there to having to hire some people on a short term basis, taking us really up to the end of June,” he says.

But over the following weeks, impacts to the food supply chain caused shortages at food banks.

“We all saw the holes on the grocery shelves, and there was no food supply coming in to us. So that was a really concerning time and we reached out to pretty much every corner, every relationship, every opportunity we could,” Jennery says.

Local farmers and closed restaurants donating items managed to sustain the food banks for a little while. “The farmers and the people in the hospitality sector, they’re going through their own troubles but they came through in spades and got food to us,” says Jennery.

But eventually, grocery stores were the only place left with steady food supply. So Feed NS decided to write cheques to each of their member food banks, allowing them to buy food from local grocery stores.

“We wrote a bunch of cheques to all those food banks and those shelters to say look, we may not be able to get food to you, go get the food from your local retailer until we figure this out,” says Jennery.

The executive director says they spent $800,000 – three times their typical annual budget.

Thankfully, in the weeks since then, Feed NS has been working to raise that money back through online donations and fundraising.

“There were people who did online trivia, music nights, sale of t-shirts, folks were incredibly, incredibly creative,” says Jennery. “I remember coming into work and finding there was a card with two toonies taped to the card and saying sorry this is all I have. Those moments are really, really motivating.”

A partnership with the NSLC in April also managed to raise $183,000 for Feed Nova Scotia.

“We could do so much good work with that, so a huge thanks goes out to everybody,” says Jennery.

The food banks will continue to try to restock and keep feeding communities as needs change through the pandemic.

“We’ve seen some food banks where the numbers have gone up and others where the numbers have gone down, and I think the latter situation is due to some folks have got a little bit of money in their pockets through some of these government programs,” says Jennery.

But when the government aid runs out, Jennery encourages people to use food banks if they need to.

“They’ve changed their operations, many of them are by appointment, many of them are low-touch, they’ll give you food in the parking lot type thing,” he says. “If you’re in need at all, call 211 and they’ll navigate you to the right place, the right organizations that will help you.”