A half dozen Greater Toronto Area food banks are hoping to collect more than a million pounds of non-perishable items over the next month as part of a joint Thanksgiving food drive.
The campaign, which runs until Oct. 14, has set a goal of collecting 1,080,000 pounds of food and $860,000 in cash donations.
The participating food banks include the Daily Bread Food Bank, the Mississauga Food Bank, NorthYork Harvest, Knights Table, the Food Bank of York Region and Feed the Need Durham.
“We can do this but only if we work together. We know that food insecurity is causing more than 100,000 families in the GTA to come to food banks and in a city as wonderful and as fantastic as ours that can’t be,” Daily Bread Food Bank CEO Neil Hetherington said at a news conference announcing the drive on Tuesday morning. “We need to have the courage to recognize the challenge and the compassion to go out and serve one another.”
The joint food drive is being held in place of individual campaigns that are usually held by the participating food banks in the lead up to Thanksgiving.
Speaking with reporters at Tuesday’s news conference, Mayor John Tory applauded the food banks for forming a “hugely important partnership.”
“It is really important that we as a community engage ourselves in trying to help others because it isn’t solely the job of government. Governments have an important role to play but we have an obligation as part of building a strong city, a strong region to say that we are going to involve ourselves as well,” he said. “Nobody can do this alone.”
Individuals wishing to donate to the food drive can do so at participating grocery stores across the GTA and fire stations.
Organizers of the food drive say that some of the most needed items include canned fruit, canned vegetables, rice, pasta, and high protein goods such as peanut butter.
