Yes. There is a small grant available to food banks from our provincial government to help cover operating expenses. Unfortunately that grant, for us, equates to less than 5% of what we need to operate—not even including the food donations side of things—so it's certainly not the government's help that enables us to continue to operate.
What I mentioned in my opening remarks is that many food banks are saying they know this problem is unsustainable. We're not going to be able to continue to meet 35% increases year over year, so we have to evolve and adapt. The challenge with evolving and adapting is that it requires even more investment from the agency.
At times, government funding is hard to navigate, and there isn't necessarily a pocket of money available to say, “Hey, food charities: Apply here, and this will help you to develop,” so what we do is chase agriculture funding, because it's somewhat applicable. We're trying to make ourselves fit into these buckets of funding that are available, but it's very challenging to be able to unlock those. When we can't unlock the government money, it's hard to unlock the private philanthropic money that we're working on as well. It's certainly a challenge from a funding perspective for food banks.
I'd say of our $1.5-million budget, almost 80% is private donations from people in the community who say, “We don't want hungry people in our community and we're going to support agencies that are doing something to make sure it doesn't happen.” It is a critical time for the food bank network overall and for our agency to have government support and government teamwork at the table.