How do you, in just a few short minutes, explain the scope of what organizations like Greener Village do?
Greener Village very much started as a food bank providing food services and cans of food and helping people who were in need. That was in 1983. We have actually made the evolutionary jump one time, and that's when we bought a new property in 2012. It's a 20-acre property. We have greenhouses and growing operations there where we teach people how to grow their own food. We have a class 5 learning kitchen with a Red Seal chef who's employed by our organization full time to teach people how to use their food effectively and how to make food that tastes good, that's economical and that's healthy. You can have all three, but you have to instill time and know-how to make that happen. It's not just automatic.
When we moved to our new facility, we turned our clothing bank, which use to be piles of clothes on tables that people could rummage through, into a thrift store where clients get gift cards. They are able to shop with a gift card, and the general public can shop. This helps us to generate revenue through social enterprise to help facilitate and support our organization.
We've made that leap from an old model to a new model. It was a lot of sleepless nights. It was a lot of worrying about how we were going to push it forward, how we were going to keep the funding going, how we were going to make all these things work. We did it largely alone. We didn't have significant government support to do that. We just did it.
Today we stand on the verge of another evolution for our organization. It's not that we will change and stop doing the things that we're currently doing and doing well; instead, we're adding something new, the food rescue that I mentioned several times. We're currently in the early stages of a significant fundraising campaign to raise money to build a food rescue centre. If there's a food donation of volume, that's very hard for small agencies to deal with. Imagine, if you will, a tractor-trailer load of carrots that comes in all at one time. There are only so many carrots that you can give to food bank clients before they say that they don't need a 50-pound bag of carrots. A tractor-trailer load of carrots would mean that you would have to give away a 50-pound bag to every client for about a week to move them out the door. That's problematic.
What we're saying is that we can create a centre that can receive those carrots, process them, steam them, freeze them and repackage them. Then we have a frozen product that can continue to work for us for six months, eight months or nine months. In that way, we're giving a two-pound bag of carrots to each family who visits for a very long time. Additionally, we can then feed the food bank network in New Brunswick, which has 65 agencies in it. We can back-feed those frozen carrots into the network so that those carrots don't just help Greener Village, our agency, and the 5,000 people that we support; they also support other agencies throughout the province.
The reality is that food banks want to do this. Because of our place within our communities, the people that we serve and the relationships that we build with our client base, we realize the needs that are in the community and how we can develop. The challenge becomes how to get the funding.
What I hear from funders repeatedly when I go to tell them about our project is this: “Where's government? What is government doing to support this? We think this is a wonderful idea, but have you had any commitments or conversations with the federal government? Have you had any conversations with the provincial government? Have you had any conversations with municipal government?”
At this stage, we've had conversations with everybody, everybody who would listen. The municipal government is the only one that has come forward with the actual support.