By: Alex McCuaig
Donations to the Medicine Hat and District Food Bank are going out the door just about as fast as they are coming in as the pandemic’s effects are starting to hit families.
Melissa Mullis, the food bank’s director of community relations, says The 40 Hot Meal Project launched last week which sees corporate sponsors pay for restaurants to produce meals is proving to be a needed supplement to the food hampers going out the door.
But the need is great in the community.
“We need a lot of items to go in the hampers – basic items like rice and pasta and soup,” said Mullis.
The Joy Project
The buy-a-meal, share-a-meal project isn t the only way Urban Foods Catering is helping those in need this holiday season. They ve also partnered with The Joy Project, a local effort to provide Christmas meals to those living in homeless shelters or low-income housing projects organized by Marisa Bengston-Loerzel.
Bengston-Loerzel founded The Joy Project in 2013 after noticing a school bus dropping children off at the Grand Inn in Moorhead. The first thing I did was ask myself what a school bus was doing at a hotel. I thought maybe their parents worked there. Not long after it dawned on me that they were going home. That they lived in the hotel, she said.
By: Alex McCuaig
The 40 Hot Meal Project will soon start to deliver on its pledge to feed Hatters in need.
It’s a remarkable turnaround for an initiative launched in the hours following Tuesday’s announcement the province would be going into a second COVID-19 lockdown.
The idea of The Hot Meal Project is to encourage local companies and individuals to donate $250 which in turn will go to provide local restaurants negatively impacted by the new restrictions some income in return for 40 prepared meals that will go to Hatters in need.
“It’s a program that helps so many people at a time of the year when people deserve the help,” organizer Torrey Mattson says in his Facebook post on Tuesday evening.