Cortes Food Bank Recieves Standard of Excellence Accreditation from Foodbanks Canada

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - The Cortes Island Food Bank was one of the nation’s first food banks to receive Standards of Excellence accreditation from Food Banks Canada.

The Associations President Beatrix Baxter, explained, “Filipe Figueira, our Executive represented us at the Food Banks Canada Conference in Montreal. During the event, Food Banks Canada honoured food banks across the country that have met their rigorous Standards of Excellence. We are proud to share that Filipe was among a handful of leaders recognized. Achieving this standard takes a tremendous amount of work—especially since so many food banks, like ours, are largely volunteer-run. Few organizations have the capacity to dedicate the hundreds of hours required, which makes this recognition even more meaningful.”

Over the years, Food Banks Canada has found that food banks have been pretty uneven in the types of services they offer, and their values.

Baxter stressed the fact that the number of Canadians struggling with hunger is increasing.

“ It's a bad situation for many Canadians who are struggling to make the decision of whether they are going to afford rent, or food? Are they going to be able to offer their children one meal a day, or no meals?”

There is no government program to address this.

The Standard of Excellence Program has three main goals:

Raising everyone’s service quality, so food banks across Canada have the same ethics, transparency and level of financial accountability.
Improving transportation systems so that, for example, locally grown food can be shipped from the east, where it is plentiful, to areas like BC, which is really behind the rest of the nation agriculturally. ( “We are producing a shockingly low amount of food for the amount of farmland that's been cleared.”)
Submitting all of the data into one system, so that Food Banks, Canada can go to government officials every month and say, ‘look, our numbers are going up. We don't have enough food. We don't have enough money. We need the support. We are offering frontline emergency support to Canadians. You need to deal with this.’

Operations Manager Angelica Raaen said that in October, Food Banks Canada will be sending two inspectors to inspect the Cortes Island facility, ensuring they continue to meet and maintain these high standards.

“ Locally we've seen donations have been going down so much, while need has been rising,” said Baxter. “We don't understand why this is happening because there's such wealth in this community. It is heartbreaking, honestly, to see this happening. We really want to understand why people are feeling less generous. Ultimately we're really hoping that if we prove ourselves to be of a high ethical standard, providing a high client care service, people will entrust us with their donations and their support”