Food Bank | Nellies

Posts Tagged ‘food bank’

Our weekly food program gets a brand-new home

Posted on: April 18th, 2024 by Nellie's No Comments

At the end of January, our weekly food program moved to a new location inside the Kimbourne Park United Church in the East Danforth neighbourhood, and our team is feeling so fortunate to be able to run our program out of this beautiful, spacious spot.

“The church has been such an amazing partner in helping us along the way — they’re super supportive,” says Amanda Nobile, our Community Support & Outreach program coordinator. “And the space itself has been great. It’s so nice to have a larger space where we can spread out more. It’s been very smooth in the way that we’ve set it up to hand out food to our clients. It’s also just a beautiful, calm space, with a really nice energy. It feels very nice to be in this beautiful place that we’re so welcomed in.”

Every week, 120 families rely on our food program to access a basic human need — that’s as much as double the number we were serving just a year prior. And there are another 60 families we could be serving if we had the resources. Our new, larger location provides the space to potentially expand our program, but in order to do so, we’ll need to secure additional food donations, and have the people power for client administration, food sorting, and cleaning. Currently our team is working on grant applications to help us purchase fridges and freezers for our new location, which would allow us to store more fresh food, and start offering weekly milk, eggs, meat, and bread for our clients.

As with most food programs, we depend on donations from our community and agencies. Every Tuesday morning, our friends at Second Harvest — a food rescue charity — deliver fresh, frozen, and packaged foods. From week to week, we fill food baskets with a wide variety of foods, like fresh fruit and vegetables, pasta and rice, peanut butter, and milk. We round out each basket with stock from our own non-perishable food pantry to ensure that each family receives a nourishing mix of protein, canned and boxed goods, and produce.

While we work towards adding more fresh food to our offerings, Amanda hopes that we’ll be able to start increasing the amount of food we can provide to our clients each week. “I know a lot of our clients go to more than one food bank,” says Amanda. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to eliminate that, that they’re not going to have to run around and go to multiple different food banks — they’ll only have to do a one-stop shop and have enough food for the week.”

Now that we’ve settled in our new location, we’ve been thrilled to see the many ways this larger space can enhance our food program experience and increase the number of families we support through this crucial service. “[In our previous location], we used to only be able to have a few volunteers, especially since the space was small,” explains Amanda. “But now we’ve been able to get volunteers through the church as well, and they’ve been such an amazing help. It’s way less stressful and the whole production of everything is just so much quicker.”

Thank you again to Kimbourne Park United Church for being such an amazing partner, and helping us provide an enhanced food program experience for our Nellie’s clients!

To make a secure online donation to our food program, please donate here.

Providing support through our Senior Socialization program

Posted on: February 1st, 2024 by Nellie's No Comments

Launched in November 2022, the Senior Socialization program at Nellie’s is one of the newest ways that we’re continuing to look outside our shelter walls and be a force for change in our community. The program was born out of a need to provide further support and connection for the seniors living in our community, most of whom we connected with through our food program. Amanda Nobile, our Community Support & Outreach program coordinator who runs the food program, began to notice that many of the older women who were visiting our food program every week were very lonely and isolated — a situation that worsened with the pandemic.

“We noticed that even though the food program doesn’t open until 12:30pm, a lot of them would come by around 10am to just hang out,” says Amanda. “It became a place for them to socialize with each other and make some friends in their community. So we wanted to expand on that because we saw that it was definitely a need for them.”

From there, the Nellie’s team applied to, and ultimately received funding from, a New Horizons for Seniors grant, which aims to promote healthy aging through the development of community supports for seniors. Our goal is to increase both educational and social programming for seniors to reduce social isolation.

The true highlight of the program has been group trips to Toronto attractions, such as the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Ripley’s Aquarium. “We’ve done quite a few trips now, and they’ve been received so well — the seniors love them!” says Amanda. “I wish I could run them way more often, and every week have somewhere to go, but they’re definitely a lot of work to plan, and it’s hard to get affordable tickets.” We’re incredibly thankful to the ROM, the AGO, and Ripley’s, all of whom have given us either free or heavily discounted tickets.

“I like to pick places where we’re not just socializing and going to have a coffee, but we’re going somewhere that our clients typically wouldn’t be able to afford,” explains Amanda. “A lot of these people have lived in Toronto for their whole lives, and many of them are immigrants who came to Toronto and have lived here for the past 20-30 years, and they’ve never been able to visit these major Toronto attractions because they can’t afford it.”

Amanda explains that typically the group will do a one-hour tour together, and then if they want to stay and explore the rest of the attraction, they can do so on their own or in smaller groups or pairings. “It’s really sweet to see them pair off with someone that they just met, and ask if they want to go to an exhibit together, or go grab a coffee, or travel back to the east end together,” says Amanda. “They start pairing off and making friends, which is the whole point of the program. Seeing that actually work has been really heartwarming.”

The educational part of the program focuses on digital literacy, which originated as group workshops and has now transitioned into private or semi-private tutoring sessions, where senior women can bring their device and get all their questions answered in a supportive environment. “This has been even more impactful than the more broad workshops,” explains Amanda. “We’ve had seniors that love it and keep coming back, and they’re super excited to have this space where they can expand their learning opportunities.”

Another element of the program has been a bi-weekly yoga class, run by an amazing teacher named Kristen who has volunteered her time as an instructor. A core group of approximately 20 participants attend each session, where they focus on breathwork and light stretching in a very mindful practice catered to the seniors’ abilities.

As the Senior Socialization program expands, Amanda plans to still feature special trips, but she’s also hoping to start up a weekly or bi-weekly seniors drop-in, providing the women with somewhere to go on a regular basis to meet people and socialize more often. These drop-in meetings would also allow Nellie’s to meet more of the community’s needs, by bringing in experts or hosting sessions that they specifically request, such as a financial expert during tax season, or running a games day or a movie night.

“The participants are always asking me: ‘what’s the next thing? When can we get together again?’” explains Amanda. “I want to be able to provide them with a space where they can come if they have any issues or just want to meet new friends, and we will do our best to be able to provide that through the drop-in program.”

A message from Executive Director Jyoti Singh

Posted on: December 21st, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

If you’re feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders lately, you’re not alone. Here at Nellie’s, we’re all feeling the financial pressures of rising grocery prices and housing costs, while also managing our emotions around ongoing wars and climate change concerns. It’s not easy being a human in this world right now, and yet every day, I still manage to feel encouraged, thanks to the incredible generosity of our community.

Despite everything, our donors still continue to support the women and children at Nellie’s. We know that making the choice to donate your hard-earned dollars to charity is not an easy thing to do at this time, and yet here you are, choosing Nellie’s. I think it speaks to the importance of the work that we’re doing, and also to the phenomenal generosity of the people who support us. It leaves me kind of speechless to see our community continuing to show up for our women and children. We’re so incredibly thankful to all of you.

Because again, due to rising costs and inflation, it’s become harder and harder for us to operate our shelter at our standards. To purchase enough food for the women and their children living in our shelter, along with the 120 families in our community who rely on our food bank every week. To buy enough supplies to support the 81 women and their 61 children who stayed with us in 2022/2023.

Fortunately, some good financial news came along recently though: in November, the federal government announced that they will be investing $162 million over four years to support the implementation of the National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence in Ontario. The plan is focused on three priority areas: increasing prevention efforts; reaching underserved and at-risk populations; and stabilizing the GBV sector. As we move into the new year, we’re looking forward to how this funding will help us stabilize our finances here at Nellie’s.

As we move into 2024, we will continue to honour 50 years since Nellie’s first opened its doors. This fall, we held our annual general meeting in person for the first time since COVID — being able to celebrate and mark our achievements with our staff, board members, and volunteers all in one place was very special for us. We are currently working on planning a few more small, tasteful events to mark our 50th anniversary and celebrate the dedication of our staff and supporters over the last half of a century. In the new year, we’ll also be updating our logo, mission, and vision statements, and we can’t wait to show you our rebranded look later in 2024, which will better reflect our current vision for our organization.

Over the past five decades, Nellie’s has primarily been known for the shelter and support we provide to women and their children fleeing violence, trauma, and homelessness — and while our crisis services will always be a core priority for our organization, we’re excited to also be shifting our focus to delivering empowerment and prevention programs that disrupt the cycle of violence.

Because across the GBV sector, one troubling fact we’re hearing about is that the next generation of our clients are now starting to come through our doors — the children who first came to our shelter with their moms, are now coming through as adults. This solidifies to us the need to be doing more as a system to break the cycle and to focus more on prevention. We hope that the story 50 years from now is very different. While we may not be able to completely eradicate gender-based violence in the next 50 years, we can definitely lessen the impact by breaking the cycle for future generations.

Thank you for your continued, generous support — it’s because of you that everything we do is possible.

Posts Tagged ‘food bank’

Our weekly food program gets a brand-new home

Providing support through our Senior Socialization program

A message from Executive Director Jyoti Singh

Daily Bread Toronto launches Fall Food Drive at Nellie’s