Community Cares Kitchen provide lunches to students and their families

On addition to the 11 locations, Guimond said they are in talks with the Prince Albert Catholic School Division to add more locations.

From Monday to Friday, volunteers are at the 11 locations starting at noon to hand out these lunches.

With students unable to attend in-classroom learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, some are missing out on the lunch programs offered at their schools. Guimond explained this is the driving force behind the Community Cares Kitchen brown-bagged lunch program.

“I noticed in the first four weeks of operations here in the city I was coming back here every night at 6:30 p.m. to make supper for a small group of children that were coming here, and that number of children grew as they knew they could come here and get something to eat,” she said.

In the two weeks the program has been operating, she said they have been handing out well over 300 sandwiches a day.

She said the locations they’re set up at are open to the public.

“Our teachers and our education staff are setting up tables and traffic is stopping to pick up a brown bag lunch,” she said. “Part of the dynamic when you’re dealing with food security, and this is really important, is that yes we’re feeding our children but what about the parents that chose not to eat because they wanted to save that food for their children.”

She added the parents who have pulled over to grab a lunch have been truly grateful for their meal. The lunches are made with higher quality ingredients.

“Every day the numbers have increased so here at Parkland I had initially set up to make 45 lunch bags, I’m over 200,” she said.

Superintendent of schools for the SRPSD, Cory Trann said they decided to get involved to help fill the void for their students who are missing out on lunch programs when they were in school.

“When we went into supplemental learning and suspension of classes of course all our schoolteachers, principals and all our sports staff were concerned about our families and making sure our students were having their nutritional needs met,” Trann said.

The division were looking at ways to support their students and when the Community Cares Kitchen began their program Trann said they quickly jumped on board.

“With schools’ access to families and those relationships we have it was a natural partnership for us to be involved with connecting families to food,” he said.

The locations include King George Public Elementary School, École Arthur Pechey Public School, John Diefenbaker Public School, the First Baptist Church, Vincent Massey Public School, Riverside Public School, Princess Margaret Public School, W.J. Berezowsky Public School, Westview Public School, Queen Mary Public School and at Parkland Hall.

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Ian.gustafson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @iangustafson12

by Ian Gustafson

Community Cares Kitchen provide lunches to students and their families

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