Food For Life: How some organizations in Ottawa are addressing the food insecurity gap

Ottawa Horticultural Society’s recent panel discussion on food insecurity sheds light on the growing crisis in our communities

LORI GANDY

In late March, the Ottawa Horticultural Society (OHS) hosted a panel discussion with speakers from the Ottawa area who are actively working to address food insecurity in our community. Below are brief highlight of the presentations. The full recording is available on the OHS YouTube channel.

Julianne Labreche, past president of the OHS, introduced the discussion with a sobering statistic: 1 in 4 households in Ottawa are driven to seek emergency food assistance because of housing costs, inflation and inadequate social assistance.

Peter Tilley, CEO of The Ottawa Mission, led off the discussion. “We are here today to talk about food insecurity,” he said and then added “but what we are really talking about is hunger.”

The Ottawa Mission is one of Canada’s largest and most innovative downtown shelters for homeless, offering a full range of services, including addiction and job training programs and in-house mental health supports.

The Ottawa Mission currently serves 1,600 meals a day in-house, up from around 450 in 2013. Their food truck program, started during the pandemic, serves 11,000 meals a week across the city, over 500,000 meals a year. Combined, the two programs serve 1.2 million meals a year.

Nelson Coyle provided an overview of the activities of the Carlington Healthful Food Working Group, an initiative operating in the Carlington area for the past eight years, led by volunteers in partnership with local community and recreation centres.

Beginning with a plant giveaway at the Yard and Plant sale in Carlington, the group also offers planting workshops and a Seed Harvest project that has yielded a variety of vegetables, including cucumbers, beans, and peas served up for an after-school snack program. Soup-making workshops are also held to teach residents how to use the fresh produce grown in the gardens managed by the group.

Carla De Ciccio is the Director of Marketing, at Growcer. Established in 2016, Growcer provides vertical hydroponic farms that can grow up to 10,000 pounds of fresh produce per year, in any climate from -40^o to +40^o, using 95% less land and 90% less water than traditional agricultural methods. 

Growcer started in Ottawa and is now in 700 communities across 30 countries. They have partnered with many community organizations – schools, food banks, hospitals, local health organizations and universities. Growcer has a partnership with RBC, and is now building a Fresh Solutions Network to raise funds from philanthropic donors to assist communities with infrastructure costs.

Cecilia Lee, a member of the OHS Board of Directors is the co-lead for the Community Impact Program that provides financial support and expertise to

community gardening projects focused on sustainability, food security and biodiversity enhancement. Lee provided highlights on three of the supported Initiatives.

The Children’s Garden of Old Ottawa East works with schools and the local community to offer an array of programs to educate and inspire community engagement in sustainable gardening practices.

Centretown Community Garden Rehabilitation Project brings together the resources of Just Food and the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation to improve biodiversity in the urban space, support pollinators, foster a sense of serenity for residents, and provide gardening opportunities for urban dwellers.

Green Thumb Garden, led by the Orleans Cumberland Community Resource Centre, is supported by multiple community partners. Last year, 430 portions of fresh produce were delivered to a local food bank for residents to enjoy on the same day they were picked. 

Tom Robson is the coordinator of the Ottawa Food Bank’s (OFB) Community Harvest Farm, a 12-acre enterprise near Stittsville where they grow 20 different food crops for distribution through the OFB. Its objective is to help increase the supply of locally grown produce for the emergency food system here in Ottawa.

Five full-time staff work on the farm, but the real power driving the enterprise is volunteers. Anyone interested in volunteering should visit the OFB website to sign up.