I Can for Kids has been featured in the Calgary Herald’s Christmas Fund, highlighting the incredible work we do to address childhood food insecurity in our community. The article showcases how our innovative income-based model is making an impact by supporting thousands of food-insecure children and their families with dignity and choice. This is a proud moment for us, made possible by the unwavering support of our donors, agency partners, and volunteers.
Through our Christmas Fund outreach, help support local agencies in their work to tackle food insecurity and hunger.
Calgary Herald
By Valerie Fortney
Published December 13, 2024
Hunger and food insecurity — the latter defined as being without reliable access to a sufficient quality of healthy and affordable food — have long plagued a segment of the population in this otherwise prosperous part of the world. Nearly four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which laid bare those inequities, the problem indeed seems to have only gotten worse.
With inflation and grocery prices increasing by 23 per cent since 2020, one in five Canadians now report having difficulty putting food on the table. According to the 2024 Quality of Life Report by the Calgary Foundation, a quarter of us can’t afford healthy food, with 39 per cent of Calgarians reporting that they are skipping meals in order to ensure there’s enough food for their kids. Not surprising, then, that visits to food banks have skyrocketed, with more than two million visits this past year, a number that Food Banks Canada says is a 90 per cent increase over 2019. Those numbers also translate into more than 75,000 Calgary children often heading off to school without enough in their bellies to fuel their busy day.
For some people, these stats spur them into action. That’s what happened back in 2015, when Bobbi Turko established I Can for Kids Foundation, with the ambitious mandate of feeding the city’s hungry children. What started as a traditional food-providing model changed in 2020, when the pandemic made the job extremely difficult due to disrupted food supply chains. Since that challenging time, I Can for Kids has become a supplier of food gift cards, distributing more than $3 million in cards and helping more than 34,000 food-insecure children in our community.
“COVID was terrible but it came with a silver lining for us,” says Turko, who credits her then-11-year-old daughter Sutton Garner for helping her to get I Can for Kids off the ground and running for the past 10 years. “Now we are exclusively gift cards, and we’re going gangbusters.” Her observations are supported by a recent University of Calgary study showing the new, innovative model they stumbled upon four years ago had a far greater impact than their previous approach. “It takes the stress off people,” she says, “and it empowers families with that dignity and confidence to plan and provide the food that meets their unique needs.”
Turko credits the more than two dozen community agencies she partners with in helping her make sure those grocery gift cards get in the right hands and make a difference for those struggling to feed their kids. “It also helps our agency partners provide immediate support,” she says of her two-person operation. (She recently hired a director of programs and partnerships, with her daughter Sutton having nearly completed a nursing degree at the University of Calgary). “We no longer need that 20,000 square foot warehouse to run an effective food program.”
Video: See how I Can for Kids is making an impact on the growing issue of food insecurity in our city.
Special thanks to Postmedia Calgary for highlighting our efforts!
Read the full article here.
