Food banks across New Brunswick lack adequate facilities, storage and funding to meet a growing need, according to a report by Feed NB and the Human Development Council. CBC News reports that the findings point to a sector under strain, one that is being asked to serve more people even as its own capacity to store and hand out food is stretched thin across the province.
The report was built on a broad look at the sector, drawing on interviews with staff at 68 food banks and community kitchens across the province. It found that many of them lack the facilities, storage and funding needed to keep up with rising demand, and it also highlighted a shrinking pool of volunteers that the food bank sector relies on to keep its doors open.
The pressure is being felt on the ground in Moncton, where one food bank served nearly 2,000 families in July and is seeing the effects of the increasing demand firsthand. Staff there described days so busy that workers do not even get a break, and the operation leans heavily on volunteers, with only seven permanent paid staff to keep everything running.
That rising demand has forced changes to how help is offered. The Moncton food bank said it has had to rethink its service model because there are no more hours in the day and no more days in the week to add. It has reached capacity, and it said new people coming in no longer have the option to register to receive food twice a month the way they once could.
The challenges are not confined to the province's larger centres. A food bank in a smaller community, one with a population smaller than Moncton, serves between 450 and 550 families every month and says it faces the same problems. Donations are down while space to store food is limited, and there is a constant struggle to have enough money in the bank to pay staff and keep the lights on.
Operators also say the way grants are structured does not match their reality. When they apply for funding from the government or from foundations, they said, the money is generally not geared toward maintaining day to day operations. To ease the strain, the report recommends increased government funding, exploring different models such as mobile food banks or merging organizations, and calling on the government to invest in affordable housing, childcare and lowering the cost of food.
The report lands after a recent injection of provincial money. In June, the province gave Feed NB $9 million to buy more and higher quality food. In a statement, the Department of Social Development said every community kitchen and food bank that applied for funding last year received what they asked for, even as the new report argues that more support is needed to fix the sector's gaps in facilities, storage and staffing.