Food Banks at both the Quesnel and Williams Lake Salvation Army are running low and the demand is getting higher.
Elaine Schonke, Family Service Director at the Quesnel Salvation Army, said last year at this time they had 77 appointments and now they have 98 food bank appointments.
“We are definitely running low on a lot of things like peanut butter, sidekicks, rice, the proteins, the canned meat, juice boxes”
Schonke said when it comes to serving lunches they’ve had to adapt and make changes
“Normally serve almost a hundred people a day at our soup kitchen so yesterday (Wednesday) we started serving bagged lunches and we had 85 people come through the door to just grab a bagged lunch and a bottle of water and move on,” Schonke said. “ Our donations don’t really anticipate that kind of thing like bread, lunch meat, we ran out so we grabbed some bread and stuff to make it go for the next couple of days”.
Tamara Robinson, Community Outreach and Family Services Director at the Williams Lake Salvation Army, said the situation at their Food Bank is critically low.
“We need everything from cereal to canned soup, pasta, pasta sauce, peanut butter, canned meat, all those types of items. It is difficult for us to find those items on the shelves right now as well cause when I go to purchase off the shelf there’s not much left for me to purchase to buy for the food bank”.
Robinson said in just the last they had six new families coming forward needing assistance and yesterday we had to reduce the size of our hampers so that everybody gets something.
Both Robinson and Schonke said donations of any non-perishable items to their Food Banks would be greatly appreciated and accepted.