Flavours from Home

Flavours from Home Food Drives are a new initiative of DiverseCity Fellows and the North York Harvest Food Bank. The drives seek to improve emergency food services for ethnic communities by increasing the supply of culturally-familiar and nutritious foods for food banks in northern Toronto.

North York Harvest’s service area includes some of Toronto’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, many of which are also waypoints for newcomers to Canada. Not surprisingly, this diversity is also reflected in the increasing number of people who are turning to neighbourhood food banks. Both newcomer communities and long-time Canadians struggling on low incomes face limited access to the foods that they are used to having in their homes and on their dinner tables.

A Flavours from Home drive encourages participants to reflect on their relationship with food and to donate non-perishable food items that are a part of their own diets. In essence, the drives seek to leverage diversity within the community in order to increase the variety of food available to people accessing food banks.

Flavours from Home food drives also offer team building opportunities for the diverse workplace. The drives provide an opportunity to celebrate diversity while developing organizational cultural competency. To get started with your Flavours from Home food drive, contact tanya [at] northyorkharvest [dot] com (Tanya Thomas) at 416-635-7771 ext. 59.