Our Blog
Our partnerships with Primary Care Alberta support new moms and babies
Welcoming a new baby should be a time of joy and celebration. Yet food-insecure mothers experience burdens and stressors that affect their physical and emotional health, create challenges with breastfeeding, make it harder to follow health guidelines for feeding their babies, and increase financial strain.
Our partnerships with Primary Care Alberta support new moms and babies
Welcoming a new baby should be a time of joy and celebration. Yet food-insecure mothers experience burdens and stressors that affect their physical and emotional health, create challenges with breastfeeding, make it harder to follow health guidelines for feeding their babies, and increase financial strain.
Let’s make food more accessible to families in crisis
This story is not unique. Nearly 1 in 3 people in Alberta are experiencing some degree of food insecurity. Whether it’s a short-term crisis or a long-term struggle, these families face many barriers to accessing support from traditional food programs. Time-consuming referral processes. Invasive questionnaires. Challenges getting to and from food distribution locations on a bus or in a taxi. And feelings of embarrassment.
New research review finds traditional food-based interventions fail to reduce food insecurity
At I Can for Kids, we follow third-party research closely to ensure that our program uses an evidence-backed approach. We were very interested to dig into a recent systematic review of research compiled by the Public Health Agency of Canada – assessing the effectiveness of food-based interventions to mitigate household food insecurity.
Grocery gift cards fuel learning at Step by Step early childhood programÂ
Step by Step Early Intervention Society is one of I Can for Kids’ newest community partners. They provide exceptional early childhood education and supports for developmentally delayed and disabled children and their families. Their teachers and staff see firsthand the link between nutrition and learning.Â
Essentials not extras: How food-insecure families use grocery gift cardsÂ
In this blog, we explore how food-insecure populations make the most of their limited household budgets.
More Alberta kids than ever are growing up in food-insecure homesÂ
A food insecurity crisis is gripping Alberta. New data released by Statistics Canada in May show a staggering 1.46 million Albertans now live in food-insecure households – they don’t have enough income to put food on the table, every meal, every day. This means that nearly 2 in 5 kids in Alberta are growing up without reliable access to enough healthy food, up from 1 in 5 just a few years ago.Â
The grocery gift card approach gains momentum and credibility
Like everybody else, those of us at I Can for Kids (iCAN) recognize the comfort and security of traditions. Familiar practices feel easy, safe, and reassuring. Yet there are major risks if our society relies blindly on the comfort of longstanding approaches to major social and health issues. When it comes to empowering households who lack the income to buy enough food, iCAN realized how more than forty years of traditional food programming had fallen significantly short. That’s why in 2020, we took advantage of the global pandemic to implement and study a rapid and innovative change to our response to food insecurity.Â
Fuel healthy futures with Save-On-Foods
Our 11th annual fundraising campaign with Save-On-Foods is officially underway! All month long, when you donate in-store or online, Save-On-Foods will match the first $10,000 raised, doubling your impact.
