A classroom in Scarborough, Ont., on Sept. 14, 2020.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Fatima Da Silva is executive director of Nourish Cowichan.
To say the past few years have been challenging for most is an understatement. From the pandemic to a looming financial crisis, increasing cost of living, ailing health care system and the effects of climate change – like the devastating wildfires our province is currently experiencing – we have all witnessed the many ways our world, and ways of living, have been challenged. Sadly, the impact of these challenges is felt hardest in demographics already affected by poverty and food insecurity.
The 2022 BC Child Poverty Report Card – issued by First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society – shows a decrease in the number of children living in poverty (from 1 in 5 to 1 in 8) compared to the year prior. But these statistics reflect a time when many families were able to access COVID-19 response emergency government income support. This help has now run out. With inflation persisting and housing and food costs increasing, we know the number of children and families living in poverty is rising again at an alarming rate.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of families across British Columbia are living with food insecurity, meaning they are forced to cut back on the amount and types of food they eat. Many skip meals altogether. Every month, food banks in B.C. serve more than 248,000 meals and snacks to families in need – a number that is rising, according to Food Banks Canada, which saw demand for food banks increase by 25 per cent between 2021 to 2022.
Classroom hunger is a very real issue, affecting children not only short-term, but long-term too, with hunger driving an educational attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers.
But solutions exist. Our charity, Nourish Cowichan, began a school breakfast program in one school in the Cowichan Valley in 2017, supporting approximately 90 students. We have since expanded our support to provide nourishing breakfast, lunch and snacks to more schoolchildren, and a weekend food relief program for families in the community.
Our services, which offer a lifeline to so many school students, have been identified by the Ministry of Education as a model program in our province. The demand for our services is directly affected by the food insecurity families are experiencing, and in the past school year, we saw an increase of more than 50 per cent in requests for school meals in our district. Starting this September, we will be supporting more than 1,300 students – a number we expect to rise more than 20 per cent during the academic year – in 21 partner schools in the Cowichan Valley.
Canada is, shockingly, the only G7 country without a national school food program. Although B.C. has made some significant steps in providing funding for schoolchildren, some of which has supported Nourish’s work, we are still far from solving the issue of providing school meals for all children who need them – and charities cannot solve the problem of classroom hunger alone. Access to food, especially for our children, should never be considered a privilege.
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As families across B.C. have been struggling with the steep increase in the overall cost of living, so has the non-profit sector. Many of the COVID emergency funds have run out, and more and more charity organizations are finding it harder to raise enough funds to keep programs afloat, when they are needed the most.
We must do better. To ensure that our children and youth are not spending their days hungry, we urgently need a long-term commitment and funding from the government, combined with program models like the ones we are building locally to be rolled out across schools in B.C. and Canada. Our community of donors, volunteers and supporters has shown that we can help children and youth get access to nutritious meals, but we need everyone to join us before the crisis worsens. Every person, every child, has a right to food – as highlighted in the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed and ratified by Canada.
It is an ambitious goal, but we owe it to our children and communities to enforce this right.
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