Our First Newsletter
Hi Folks! Welcome to the first ever Ottawa Community Food Partnership newsletter. We are so pleased that you have found your way to us.
You may be wondering “what is the Ottawa Community Food Partnership?” The OCFP started as a labour of love by Karen Secord, Executive director of the Parkdale Food Centre, in 2016. Karen met with other social service agencies and talked about the need to work together, learn from each other and establish a collective voice, to improve food security outcomes across the city? Nine founding organizations came together and a beautiful partnership was born. We are grateful to the Trillium Foundation of Ottawa for providing the grant money needed to get us started. Over the last five years we have installed seven community fridges, hosted over a dozen cultural celebrations, spent thousands of dollars on nutritious, culturally appropriate food and had one epic trip to Mayo Hill farm.
With the onset of the Covid 19 global pandemic, we quickly pivoted from the work that we had underway in 2020 and helped fill the gap in our community for meal programs. From March 2020 to date, the Ottawa Community Food Partnership's Cooking for a Cause Ottawa program has distributed 188,271 meals, 14,351 litres of soup, 13,227 loaves of bread / sleeves of bagels and 3,800 sweet and savoury buns. We are working with business partners to provide them with income by purchasing the vast majority of these beautifully crafted, nutritious, culturally appropriate meals from 20 local restaurants and caterers.
Harriet and Das Lokal team making sandwiches for Sandy Hill Community Health Centre.
Business owners like Jess at Bread by Us tell us we have offered a lifeline during the pandemic, and helped give profound meaning to the work that they are doing. The Urban Element is an ally in Harm Reduction, sending 100 hot meals daily to the Supervised Consumption site at Somerset West Community Health Centre. When Jessie from Arlington 5 tells the story of handing a still warm muffin to a Neighbour outside the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and having him exclaim he didn’t remember the last time he had a muffin that fresh, you can hear that the food is doing more than nourishing people physically, it is connecting people, and having a deep impact in our community. Requests for additional meals come in weekly from city run respite centres, partnering food banks, community outreach workers, and nonprofit housing providers. We simply don’t have the funds to keep up with the demand. Find a complete list of business and agency partners here.
While 2020 certainly had its struggles for everyone, witnessing partner organizations coming together to work with each other in new ways, and expanding to include more organizations, and work across sectors in a reciprocal way with the business community was a high point in my over 20 years as a social worker. It is powerful what our community can do when we all pull in the same direction and nourish community together. If you would like to contribute to this amazing work, please do so here: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/dn/m/52763/donation
We will have a lot of exciting updates to share in the months to come, so stay tuned - there is never a dull moment in our partnership!
Thank you,
Erica Braunovan,
The Ottawa Community Food Partnership Manager
