How many people can say they get a free lunch delivered daily from the Foreign Affairs office in Ottawa?
Well, thousands of children, actually.
The kitchen of the Sussex Avenue building is the base of operations for a program called Feeding Our Future – an initiative to make sure disadvantaged kids get a nutritious lunch during the summer when school lunch programs are on hiatus.
The food is provided free of charge by Sodexo Canada – a giant food services company. Sodexo started the program in Toronto in 2001. It has since expanded to 9 Canadian cities. In each city a small army of volunteers – mostly Sodexo employees – prepare the meals. “Here in Ottawa we have close to a hundred volunteers. We do about 15,000 lunches for the summertime,” says Sodexo Food Service Director, Daniel Sirois.
The lunches are delivered daily by the Ottawa Food Bank to over a dozen community centres around the city. There they are handed out as part of the neighbourhood’s free summer camp program.
Each lunch contains a sandwich, a fruit, a vegetable, a snack and juice. “Having a uniform lunch that meets the nutritional needs is critical for their play, for their growing, and also for the joy and interactions with their peers,” says Mohamed Sofa, Director of the Britannia Woods Community House.
According to the 2014 Household Food Insecurity in Canada Report, one in six Canadian children under the age of 18 live in households that have experienced difficulties in providing nutritious meals.
Feeding Our Future expects to deliver around 135,000 meals across Canada this summer.
