Emergency hampers help combat hunger in Canada

A new data survey from the University of Calgary in Canada has found that emergency food hamper recipients at a local centre need only one or two hampers to get their lives back on track.

According to the survey, which looked at data from people who use the Calgary Inter-Faith Food Bank, very few people who receive emergency hampers from the centre need long-term support.

Over the ten-year study period, more than 165,000 people (around 81,300 households) accessed the emergency hamper service, receiving one million hampers in total. This represents an average of 5.7 hampers per individual. However, of the 165,000 users, 81 per cent accessed the service less than nine times over the decade. In fact, most of these people used it only once or twice.

According to the Calgary Herald, Chris MacFarlane from the University of Calgary said that these results combat the general belief that people who use emergency food hampers are simply relying on handouts.

Instead, the survey found that 49 per cent of first-time users had a job-related income and that 60 per cent had a wage at the time of their last hamper collection. This means that while many of the people who use the service have some form of income, they are in temporary or insecure jobs and so need assistance from the food bank.

Emergency food hampers have become a major way of fighting hunger in Canada, where food bank usage has climbed 28 per cent in the last two years. Just before National Hunger Awareness Day, which was marked in Canada on May 31st, Food Banks Canada urged people in the country to make a greater effort to tackle hunger.

Katherine Schmidt, executive director of Food Banks Canada, said “Hunger is a persistent and growing problem in Canada… However, if each Canadian made a small, positive change, we could make a difference and address the problem of hunger in this country.”