After being in the works for about a year, a Mobile Pantry Program has made its way to Fort McKay.
Yesterday, Fort McMurray’s Food Bank team went there to initiate the 6 month pilot project.
The Fort McMurray Food Bank’s Executive Director Arianna Johnson says it will make it easier for clients, by serving them in their communities.
“Marks the first of hopefully many mobile pantry programs, which is a once a month program, where we come to Fort McKay and offer our food bank services in the local community rather than them coming into town”
She says that two years ago when the food bank ran a series of round tables with service providers, clients and community members, trying to identify what the barriers of the services were.
“For our rural locations, communities and clients, the biggest barrier was transportation. Its expensive, and if they don’t have a vehicle they’re relying on other people to get them into town to access our services, and we wanted to overcome that barrier, and this program seemed like an easy way to do that.”
The Fort McKay Health Centre’s social assistance workers help its clients fill out the application forms, and then send it to the Food Bank in Fort McMurray.
Johnson says that a regular appointment in town would take about a half-an-hour, but because all of the paper work is already done it will save about 15 minutes.
“We can serve more clients more quickly…We are able to come out and just provide the hamper”
The mobile pantry will go up once a month and be able to serve about 15 clients out of the community’s arena.
Johnson says after the 6-month pilot project is complete it will do an evaluation.
“Once that evaluation comes back and everything seems to be running well, and running the way it should run, we will then once every 6 months add a new rural location”
It expects the next community to be Janvier, with the hopes that all outlaying rural communities will have the service in 3 years.
She says the program needs to grow at a slow and steady rate so that its sustainable.
“the expansion needs to be done at a slow and steady pace, rather than just trying to throw it all in at once and overwhelming the Food Banks in-town program, because we don’t want to take-a-way from the program we already provide”
While in Fort McKay yesterday, the planner of the annual Hyde Hockey Tournament also made a donation to the project of $10-thousand.
Johnson says, “It was really awesome to meet with them and thank them for the support of our program.”
