The community of Eel Ground has been working to tackle the food security issue for about 12 years. It started out as a school food program, providing a healthy breakfast and a healthy lunch to the students on a daily basis. With that program, we've seen impacts on the kids' BMI, the students' school connectivity, their mental health, their healthy food literacy—their understanding of what fruits and vegetables are. In this day and age, some kids can't even name what a turnip is. We've been able to really have a lot of success there.
About four years ago, the community tried to take some of those lessons and put them to the community at large. That's when we developed the community food centre. What we started with was the food bank. We took the undignified food bank and we evolved it into a space where we have a multitude of programs, with three community gardens in the community. We do drop-in meals twice a week. One of those focuses on traditional protein, like moose. We've grown very quickly to a place that's very safe for people to drop in to and engage with their community, but also engage with healthy food and create access points to getting that healthy food.