Community generosity continues to chomp away at the fundraising goal for a new food bank facility in Ucluelet.
The Food Bank on the Edge Society has received about $77,000 of its $150,000 target to replace its current building at Seaplane Base Field with a new and needed food bank at Tugwell Fields.
“As I’ve said all along over the many years of this project’s duration, the state of our current building is very poor. I have literally pink duct tape holding together part of our floor, that’s no exaggeration,” the society’s executive director Cris Martin told the Westerly News last week. “It’s just time. We deserve better. Our volunteers deserve to be in a clean, healthy environment and our clients need to come to a place where they feel some dignity and respect. This will be a huge improvement on all of those counts when we get into our new space.”
Martin was speaking to the Westerly outside Ucluelet’s Co-op where a wall is dedicated to tracking the growing tally of funds raised.
“The community has been obviously so generous with us. All of this money we’ve raised so far has come from our community…This whole project is basically a community- based event,” she said.
“I have people asking me practically every day what’s happening with the new building, so I know that everybody’s excited, and I know everyone’s looking forward to the completion of our project and we’re excited too.”
The society received a 0.21-hectare chunk of land at Tugwell from the district through a Parkland Disposal Bylaw in March after passing through an alternative approval process held in lieu of a referendum.
The district also gifted $150,000 to the project from its Barkley Community Forest fund.
That $150,000 combined with the additional $150,000 expected to come through donations was initially believed to be enough for the $300,000 project, but costs have risen, leading to further fundraising needed.
“We thought we had what we needed but unfortunately, like many other construction projects are finding in town, we’re finding we have incurred unexpected construction costs,” Martin said. “We now have to continue to do some fundraising just to close the gap.”
She added the society kept a contingency fund aside in case costs escalated and she still expects work to begin at the new site later this month.
“Folks will be able to go up there and see that there’s progress being made. Ground will be broken, holes will be dug, things will be happening, so we’re very excited,”she said. “We’re inching our way closer to the end and at the end we’re going to have a huge celebration for the whole community,”
She added that the food bank’s demographic is changing and its client list has grown by more than 20 per cent over the past year.
“This isn’t a secret place where the poorest of people come. These are people in our community, our workplaces, friends and neighbours. It’s a different demographic than it was 10 years ago and it just proves that we’re conducting a very important community service,” she said.
“We’ve seen a 20 per cent increase just this year in the number of visits per month. We used to get around 80 visits per month, we’re up to over 100 visits per month consistently for the last five months. This translates to 200-300 individuals. These are people. This is part of our population here who come to us.”
She said she’s not expecting the need to decline anytime soon and expressed confidence the community will continue to support its fellow residents.
“There’s never going to not be a need. There’s always going to be a need. We’re never going to stop asking for donations because that’s how we operate. That’s how we succeed,” she said.
“I have every faith that our community will continue to support us as they always have and our surrounding communities as well, the communities that we serve all along the West Coast.”
