What is The Depot doing during the COVID-19 outbreak?
We have greatly expanded our Emergency Food Basket program while suspending other programming to allow people to stay home and respect social distancing protocols. Since March 20th, 2020, we have been providing extra-large baskets of staples and fresh foods to families in financial difficulty across our territory. We have moved to a home delivery model, reaching 250-400 households weekly.
Before this crisis, one in every three children in our community lived below the poverty line. With many more people facing economic precarity, we’re seeing hundreds of new registrations for our emergency services. To meet this increased demand we are using 4+ times as much food as normal — Since March 15th, The Depot has delivered over 175,000 pounds of healthy food to over 5,000 people in our community. To put that into perspective, that’s more people than we reached in 2019 and more than 80% of the food we gave it out in emergency food baskets in the entire year.
We are proud to have organized a quick COVID response where we were priveleged to have the ressources to adapt most of our 20 healthy food programs, now operating to some capacity. We hope to resume in person programming as soon as the COVID situation permits.