CANstruction helps to stock shelves of local food banks

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on April 12, 2023.

Herald photo by Alejandra Pulido-Guzman Staff and volunteers pack cans acquired from the CANstruction event for the Lethbridge College food bank Tuesday afternoon at the Interfaith Food Bank.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

After wrapping up last week, CANstruction YQL was able to donate more than 8,600 cans of food to the Interfaith Food Bank, the Lethbridge Food Bank and the Lethbridge College food bank.

Chair of CANstruction Lethbridge board, James Walshe, said the goal of CANstruction, which originated in the United States over 20 years ago, is to raise food for local food banks.

“In the bigger cities they do have obviously a lot more teams, a lot more members on the board, so those events can get pretty big,” said Walshe.

He said the goal locally was to not just only raise food for the food banks, but also to bring attention towards them and the need some people from the community are experiencing.

Neil Heaton, Operations Manager for the Interfaith Food Bank, said the event has always been beneficial in terms of donations, especially during the time of the year the donations are received.

“Events like this are in that quiet time where is between post-Christmas and Easter, where there’s a low in donations, as well as from Easter to Thanksgiving, so it’s always helpful to close the gap,” said Heaton.

He said events like CANstruction are also good at generating public interest and showing the need that food banks have for donations.

 “Food bank usage across the country has risen quite a bit compared to last year, and it seems like it is going to continue for a while so events like this not just generate that amount of food, but also really help promote the need to the public – which will generate further donations down the road,” said Heaton.

He said another good thing about the event is the fact that it could provide ideas of what kind of canned products go well together to create a meal.

“The one that was the Best Meal winner showed people the kind of stuff that you can make from cans, and to understand that you don’t need all the fresh produce and stuff like, which we would love to offer that, but unfortunately prices play a factor on what we can offer and cans are what people donate,” said Heaton.

He said the total amount raised by the event was 8,622 pounds of food, which is usually priced at $3.21, meaning the rough value of the food donation was almost $28,000 to be distributed among the three food banks.

Heaton explained they picked up the cans after the structures were deconstructed and along with the Lethbridge Food bank, they distributed them accordingly.

“Quite often there might be structures that have one item like tuna or something like that, so we’ll share with the other food banks just to make sure everyone gets a good variety of the foods that make the structures,” said Heaton.

Lethbridge Food Bank executive director Mac Nichols echoed Heaton’s words by saying that they all try to get an equal amount of food and share among them.

“The event itself is really important at this time of year, as we really see a drop in our donations. We’re very much a Christmas charity, a lot of our community come out and supports us then, which is great, but by the time this time of the year comes we start to see a little bit of less food in our stores which is a real problem, so with events like this it really helps kind of bridge that gap back up to our next event,” said Nichols.

He said the 8,622 pounds of food would be distributed between the three food banks with 4,000 pounds going to each of the Lethbridge Food Bank and the Interfaith Food Bank and roughly 600 pounds would go to the Lethbridge College.

“It’s not because they need less or anything like that, it’s just that our food banks have warehouses and we can hold a lot more food while the college campus doesn’t have a lot of space,” said Nichols.

On Tuesday cans of food were being packed for the college at the Interfaith Food Bank warehouse to be distributed in the coming days.

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