New partnership bringing more fresh food, educational opportunities to Thunder Bay public high schools

More fresh, local food will be on the menu at Thunder Bay's public high schools this year, thanks to a new partnership between two food organizations.

Roots to Harvest and Horizon North have teamed up to run cafeterias in the schools. Horizon North, which provides food services to mining and logging camps, will handle staffing.

Roots to Harvest — which helped develop the public school board's Fresh Cafe program, which sees more fresh and local food served in school cafeterias — will focus on programming.

"It's a huge deal," Roots to Harvest Community Food Centre executive director Erin Beagle said. "We've kind of been dreaming about it since we did get Fresh Cafe with the school board years ago."

"What would it look like if we could be more in the [cafeterias], more with the students in there, and really amplify those spaces?" she said. "When the school board announced at the end of the school year that they were looking for a new partner to come into the cafeterias, it was a kind of a call to action for us."

But the program will offer more than just quality food: Roger Drcar, Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program recruiter and the board lead for the Specialist High Skills Major program for the Lakehead Public School Board, said the program will offer plenty of learning opportunities for students, as well.

"Our students can benefit so much from all the experiential learning activities that they'll be able to do," he said. "They'll be able to do cooperative education placements, do job building skills, financial literacy."

"It's just the the involvement that Roots put in their proposal to be just an active member in our school settings," Drcar said. "It's going to be just outstanding."

Beagle said the cafeteria menus won't change too much, as Roots to Harvest helped create them in the first place.

"It's more behind the scenes," she said. "So we'll be inviting classes and students and teachers into the cafeterias to work with us to help make some of that food happen."

"The opportunity to come in and make different kinds of soups or muffins or pizza doughs or things from scratch and really get their hands in there, I think will be really exciting," Beagle said. "The other side of it is that the [cafeteria's] used to prepare food and then lunch happens, and lunch is over."

"But there's still this cafeteria in the school, and it's part of the school community that we want to bring classes in to use."

And, Beagle said, food access isn't only about getting food.

"It's about knowing enough about food to be able to provide it for yourself," she said. "That's always been a part of our thing. We use food to work with people, so now we get to do this with thousands of students."

School food program sees exponential growth 

Meanwhile, another Thunder Bay community group is working to make sure students are well-fed outside of school hours.

Isthmus Thunder Bay — which is part of a national charitable organization — is into its 10th year providing meals to students on the weekends. And in that time, the demand has grown steadily.

"We started in three schools with 100 kids, but last year we got to almost 500 kids and in 18 schools," Isthmus volunteer coordinator Amina Abu Bakare said. "That was scary."

Isthmus provides backpacks full of food for kids to eat on the weekends. The bags are packed each Thursday, and delivered to schools to be distributed to students on Fridays; Abu Bakare said while there are food options, including breakfast programs, during the school week, "weekends, there's nothing."

"For some of the kids, the breakfast program in the morning is the only food they get for the whole day."

And the increase in the cost of living has only exacerbated the problem, Abu Bakare said, as families can barely make ends meet.

Abu Bakare said donations are vital to keeping Isthmus running, and all money donated to the organization stays in Thunder Bay.

"We operate out of the Ogden Community School, and we don't have any overheads," she said. "We are all volunteers."

"I buy food from a local wholesaler in town, and they have just been amazing," Abu Bakare said. "They give us food at cost, no tax, nothing. And that's how I feed the kids."