The Rotary Club of St. Catharines Lakeshore is pleased to announce it has received a $1000 U.S. grant to assist the Food4Kids Program locally in St. Catharines. The club matched the grant with $1000 U.S. in additional funding, above and beyond our usual level of financial support for the program. | |
Formally a weekend food program only, serving over 200 impoverished children as identified by the School Boards, the closing of local schools (and their on-site food programs) during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a needed expansion of Food4Kids to provide more food per child, augmenting their nutrition through the week as well.
Within 2 hours of learning schools would be closed to help curb the spread of COVID-19, St. Catharines Food4Kids had a system in place to ensure the community’s most impoverished children had access to healthy food each week. Food4Kids is now delivering food packages directly to the doors of the children in their program. Each package contains non-perishable food, fresh produce, and a gift card to purchase milk or other fresh items. This expanded demand and rapidly increasing food prices doubled the Food4Kids weekly costs. In addition, formerly scheduled fundraising events have been canceled, dropping revenues.
Our thanks to the District 7090 Rotary Foundation Committee for making this much need funding available and the quick approval of the grant in this time of need. The club has used the new total funds to purchase additional food supplies and have them delivered to the local Food4Kids facility for packing and distribution by the charities staff (all now being done in-house due to social distancing efforts).