Western Standard - December 29, 2025


Food Bank Demand Doubles in Strathcona County as Grocery Prices Soar


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

167.25664

Word Count

2,079

Sentence Count

153

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I interview Anke Bernay, a volunteer from the Thrath-Kona Food Bank. She talks about the rise in food bank usage in Canada and how the food bank helps people in need.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. My name is Leah Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard. And
00:00:14.220 today my guest is Anke Bernay. She is a part of the public relations team. She's a volunteer
00:00:20.980 from the Thrath-Kona Food Bank, which is based, it's its own county in Alberta. And well,
00:00:28.260 today I wanted to ask Anke a few questions about the Food Bank, including the rise in use in Canada
00:00:35.800 overall. And so thank you, Anke, again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
00:00:45.140 I guess my first question for you would definitely have to be, I know the Canadian Food Bank has
00:00:50.880 reported a rise of 5.2% since 2024 as of March 2025 overall in Canada for Food Bank usage. So
00:01:00.180 have your Food Bank experienced the same rise? Absolutely. It's actually Canada, sorry,
00:01:08.180 Food Banks Canada is the entity that we belong to. And yes, they have reported a 5.2% increase. We've
00:01:15.220 seen 10% increase in one year. We've seen a 200% increase, or sorry, 100% increase in two years.
00:01:23.480 So this time last year, we were 10% lower. So yes, we have seen an increase.
00:01:29.300 Wow. Okay. Well, in that case, what do you think are the reasons why you've been experiencing the
00:01:37.120 increase? Exactly. I think the highest thing that we've seen is the rise in grocery prices and overall
00:01:45.500 cost of living increases. It's just, it's too hard for people. Some people are unemployed, some people
00:01:52.920 are underemployed. But really, I think the biggest factor for people coming to the Food Bank is they
00:01:57.980 cannot afford to live in the county and still pay for their food. Okay. And also, do you think
00:02:04.460 unemployment is also a big factor in that too? I don't have the stats at hand, but I would say yes,
00:02:10.880 that is a factor. Okay. I guess, yeah, demographic wise, do you see lots of families, lots of students,
00:02:19.820 lots of people, single home, lots of kids, like high school students, or even just university students?
00:02:27.020 We see everything. So yesterday, I was working at the Food Bank and I built 20 hampers. Half of them
00:02:33.380 were for single people. The other half were for families. 40% of our clients who access the Food
00:02:40.940 Bank are children. And by that, I mean, they're coming as a family. And so we keep the stats on
00:02:45.900 who applies for a hamper and how many people we are helping in a month. Okay. And how does your
00:02:52.720 hamper system work? I know some food banks, for example, Calgary Food Bank has told me they do
00:02:58.180 emergency hampers as well as just normal hampers, which you have to apply for beforehand, show them
00:03:05.480 ID, financial statement, and then they get three emergency hampers without having to do any of
00:03:11.940 that verification. So how does that process work at your food bank? At our food bank, we ask that
00:03:18.000 people make an appointment and then there's a rigorous questionnaire that they will answer over
00:03:23.140 the phone. We allow walk-ins, like obviously we have a big heart and we help people as much as
00:03:28.960 possible. So if somebody comes in and says that they've just moved to Strathcala County or they
00:03:34.280 need some help, because they don't have an appointment, we will give them an emergency
00:03:38.380 hamper. Those hampers are just far and few between. We don't have many of those hampers requests.
00:03:45.280 The majority of people are coming in for their monthly hamper. They are also able to come in
00:03:49.820 every week to access bread and whatever excess produce we have in our front shelves.
00:03:54.500 Okay. And what are the types of questions you ask? Like, is it similar to like asking for ID
00:04:02.000 and financial stuff or is that not included? What we ask is why they need our help. And then we,
00:04:11.960 when they do come for their appointment, they're told that they have to bring photo ID. So a driver's
00:04:16.820 license is good for ID, but then they also have to bring a piece of mail that shows that they live
00:04:21.500 in Strathcala County. And that's it. We do not ask for a financial statement. As a matter of fact,
00:04:28.140 we were told most food banks across Canada are no longer asking that.
00:04:33.320 Okay. Yeah. So that process as well. I have a question that I didn't ask any of the other food
00:04:39.280 banks that occurred to me. And I would be curious to know if you would know. If you were to keep
00:04:45.560 financial, like, uh, basically what's it called like a system where you had that information,
00:04:53.240 would that cost a lot of money to keep up?
00:04:57.320 I have no idea because we don't use that. We use a system called link to feed,
00:05:01.720 and I'm not familiar with that system enough to know if that's something that we would store the
00:05:06.840 financial records in. We do not ask, ask that question. And I would believe that security would
00:05:13.000 be the number one problem. I would be very hesitant in accepting somebody's T4 slips and
00:05:18.040 not having a secure website or storage unit for that information.
00:05:22.920 Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I guess, uh, going off that question, how do you guys ensure that people
00:05:31.320 aren't taking advantage of your resources and they're going to the right people who need them? And
00:05:37.720 is there a way to do that?
00:05:42.760 There's no hard and fast way to do that without asking that financial question. So we've decided
00:05:48.280 to flip it around. What we want to do is make the food bank accessible for everyone who needs us.
00:05:54.120 And we will ask the question of why do you need our help? But we're not asking to have them prove it
00:05:59.880 to us. But what we're seeing on the other end is we're seeing gratitude. The people that come,
00:06:04.520 that give us hugs, that give us tears, just words of appreciation. We know that's genuine. You can
00:06:10.520 tell when someone genuinely needs a hamper. And we have a gut sense too of people who may be abusing us.
00:06:18.360 But those are far and few between.
00:06:21.560 That's, yeah, probably true. I know lots of people, when I asked them a similar question,
00:06:26.760 like the different food banks, they've told me, even though there's people that abuse it,
00:06:31.080 it's obviously not everyone, just like there's not majority criminals. So that makes sense. But
00:06:38.440 if there were people abusing, do you guys just, just tell them like, oh, you can't come here anymore?
00:06:44.520 Like, what would that situation look like?
00:06:47.960 We do use this link to feed program and that gives us the ability to take notes. And so if a client shows
00:06:53.720 up repeatedly late, or they cancel their appointments, we will say you cannot continue to cancel your
00:06:59.240 appointments. We have built your hamper for you. So generally it's the three strikes and you're out.
00:07:04.120 We're trying to really err on the side of grace, but we also have to be stringent because we're
00:07:09.640 accountable for our donors. So we want to make sure that people who need the food bank are using it. So
00:07:15.000 we will keep track of people who can't show that their ID or that they live in Strathcona County.
00:07:20.600 Okay. Yeah. So on top, on the topic of the fact that prices are going up, how has that affected your
00:07:30.280 donations? Has donations, I don't know, decreased just because of the cost of living, living in people
00:07:37.880 can't afford to donate as much?
00:07:39.480 We're seeing the exact opposite. I think Strathcona County is a very generous community
00:07:45.160 and they know how expensive food is for themselves. I mean, I see it for myself. I go into the grocery
00:07:50.520 store and see the price of a cantaloupe and say, no, I'm not buying that today. I don't want to pay
00:07:55.320 $5. So I think the flip side is that people are realizing, hey, it's tough for me, but it's even
00:08:00.440 tougher for those people. So we're seeing a huge increase, especially this time of year. Christmas is
00:08:05.640 amazing. So our warehouse is very full at the moment.
00:08:09.800 Well, that's great. Do you also, I don't know how it works, but do you accept money from like your
00:08:17.640 county or is it like maybe some help from the, sorry, provincial government at all or anything like that?
00:08:26.840 Yes, there are federal and provincial grants that are awarded. If there are, during COVID,
00:08:31.640 there was the COVID reimbursement that was made to all food banks across Canada. So yes,
00:08:36.520 we do receive money, but we receive money from kids who are collecting for their birthday. Instead of
00:08:42.200 having birthday parties and gifts, they'll collect money for the food bank. We're seeing sports teams
00:08:46.920 that are organizing food drives. All the schools are organizing food drives and businesses are reaching
00:08:52.760 into their pockets and giving us checks. So we're seeing donations all across the board.
00:08:58.760 I mean, that's great. Also, I guess maybe I could ask you, have you seen lots of volunteers increased
00:09:06.760 over the past maybe year or so, or how's that going?
00:09:11.320 We are only volunteer run. We have 256 volunteers that run the Strathcona Food Bank. We have a volunteer
00:09:18.120 board of directors as well, of which I am part of. The food bank has never had a problem finding
00:09:24.120 volunteers. We have an amazing group. People like to come volunteer. We're like one big happy family
00:09:29.720 and people come away knowing that they've done a good service for one day to help one person up.
00:09:35.080 Makes you feel really good as well. So we have no trouble keeping volunteers and attracting volunteers.
00:09:41.720 Okay. Well, that's great. What else can I ask you? I guess maybe I'll ask,
00:09:49.160 so demographic wise, you did tell me that you have a bunch of different people coming in, but so there's
00:09:55.080 not, oh, sorry, I'm not in the center. There's not any specific demographics that you can say are majority
00:10:01.880 people because I was, I remember just like other food banks telling me it was unemployed people that
00:10:07.480 were going the most because obviously they're having issues with finding jobs and stuff. So that's not an
00:10:13.640 issue that you can say you've seen or no. Sorry, I just got your questions not that long ago. So I
00:10:20.280 couldn't verify that. Oh, sorry. That's okay. I'm just, we do have a fair number of people who are
00:10:28.840 unemployed. We're not tracking people who leave our guest list. So I'm assuming that people who no
00:10:35.560 longer come are finding employment. But honestly, we're, we're having people who are senior citizens that
00:10:40.920 can't make ends meet people living off of age. We know that age money is not as high as it used to be.
00:10:47.640 Uh, we're seeing, we, I don't know about students. We're not tracking if somebody is a student.
00:10:52.680 We are seeing that, uh, uh, hampers, the people in a hamper are larger. I think many people are
00:10:59.320 starting to move in together. So we'll see situations where there are four adults and five children. We know
00:11:05.160 that it's a blended family or not even necessarily a family, but just people living together
00:11:10.040 to make ends meet. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Well, in that case, thank you very much Anke for
00:11:17.800 coming on. If you have anything also to add, feel free. I know you told me you would like
00:11:24.040 to thank your donors and stuff. So if that's something you'd like to do or add anything else,
00:11:28.360 go ahead. Sure. Well, thank you, Leah, for inviting me to come to speak with Western Standard News. We
00:11:34.360 appreciate the coverage and we appreciate the support that we've received from our donors and our
00:11:39.640 community over the past 40 years. It's been an incredible place to volunteer and we are happy
00:11:45.160 to serve the residents of Stroud County. Okay. Well, thank you very much again, Anke. And if you guys
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00:12:17.240 everyone and goodbye.