Comments Off on North York Harvest Receives Feed Ontario Innovation Award
North York Harvest Receives Feed Ontario Award for Innovation!
Every year, the Feed Ontario Awards for Excellence honour food banks that have demonstrated exceptional work in innovation, advocacy, and leadership among Ontario’s network of food banks. The awards are presented each year at Feed Ontario’s annual conference, which was held this June in Kingston, Ontario.
North York Harvest Food Bank is proud to announce we are the recipients of the prestigious Innovator Award this year!
The Innovator Award, a significant recognition in the food bank sector, is presented to a food bank that has demonstrated innovation in programming, service, or sustainability.
North York Harvest’s unique, community-driven initiatives create local jobs, provide valuable skills training, and ensure robust community food programs. This innovative approach not only meets immediate needs but also empowers individuals, building a stronger, more resilient community.
“Toronto is facing an unprecedented crisis of affordability, poverty and food insecurity. North York Harvest is seeing record levels of food bank usage,” says Ryan Noble, Executive Director at North York Harvest Food Bank.
“We understand free food is only a temporary fix and that traditional charitable models fall short of solving long-term food insecurity. We have long championed a holistic approach to supporting individuals struggling with poverty alongside strategies that foster our local economy and generate wealth in our communities,” he says.
Our programs include:
- Foodreach: A collaborative food purchasing program enabling hundreds of community partners to access food at reduced costs. The funds generated from FoodReach are invested back into NYHFB, helping to sustain our emergency food support by providing no-cost food to their member agencies and food banks.
- Leadership in Logistics: A community-focused initiative of North York Harvest Food Bank that has been instrumental in empowering and investing in food bank clients. By offering paid training opportunities in logistics, warehousing, and materials handling, the program has equipped participants with a forklift certification and placed them in jobs at distribution centres, where they earn a living wage with benefits.
“Each year, Feed Ontario presents awards to honour and acknowledge the exceptional work being done in food banks across our network,” said Carolyn Stewart, Chief Executive Officer at Feed Ontario. “In every corner of Ontario, food banks are working tremendously hard to ensure that everyone in their community has access to nutritious and healthy food.”
Thank you to Feed Ontario for this recognition, and thank you to our staff, volunteers, partners and donors who make this transformative work possible!
Comments are closed