Thank you.
I'm going to talk to you a bit little about the operational, about the groundwork that's happening.
We're in western Mississauga. We have about a quarter of a million people in our area that we serve. Of that, about 17%, or 40,000 people, would be considered potential users of the food bank system or as food-insecure. We deal a lot with what's called “modern malnutrition”. Modern malnutrition is the fact that we eat too much, too much energy, and we seem to store it a lot. We usually tend to eat the wrong things.
What we've done in our community is we've opened a learning kitchen where we bring in clients from the community...or people from the community, not just clients. We teach them how to cook healthy food. We do it for free and we let them take home the food. We get a lot of support from a lot of corporate organizations and from the community on that.
We also do a couple of social enterprises. One, which we've seen a lot of success with, is called the fresh produce box program. That's where we deliver food at a very discounted price to the people of the community. We're getting more fresh fruit and produce into the community. What that does is it helps us to help the community to fight a lot of the health issues and the human issues around food insecurity. I'm sure you know a lot of them already—obesity and malnutrition, high school dropouts, child well-being issues, and social mobility issues are all found around hunger and also around debt. We do that. We also have a social enterprise where we work with other charitable organizations that maybe have partial funding for food, like the Living Arts Centre of Mississauga. They go into the community and do their arts program and we provide the healthy lunches for these organizations. We get the revenue based on that. The fresh produce box program is a self-sustaining program where we sell just above our operational costs and that helps support our growth.
So that's kind of what we're doing. In terms of the challenges we have—I know we're kind of short on time here—although we are the largest organization fighting food insecurity, we are still only hitting about 0.6% of our population. And we are the largest one in that quarter-of-a-million people.
Our greatest challenge here is largely around building scale. That's what social financing could really help us out with: building scale. How can we effectively service the 20% of our population? That's what we're aiming for.
You'll have lots of questions. I think that's where we can address things better.