Calgary Food Bank to receive large milk donation from Rock Ridge Dairy
Milk donation a boon for 800 Calgary Food Bank visitors
Beacon Staff Reporter
Owners of the Rock Ridge Dairy, Cherylynn and Patrick Bos, are donating milk to the Calgary Food Bank just in time for Christmas. Photo courtesy www.alma.alberta.ca
A milk donation is just what the Calgary Food Bank put on its wish list for Christmas, and Rock Ridge Dairy is prepared to deliver it.
The large donation of milk will come just in time for the 2012 holiday hampers, enough for hundreds of families that would otherwise do without.
The owners of Rock Ridge Dairy and Bos Farm – Patrick and Cherylynn Bos – will deliver approximately 800 litres of 2 per cent organic milk, processed fresh this week at their facility near Ponoka.
The milk donation will be made at Calgary Food Bank at about 2 pm on Friday (Dec. 14).
The donation is being made for the simple reason the Bos family wants to do something amazing, and they are challenging others to do the same.
Tens of thousands of children, youth and pregnant women access the Calgary Food Bank every year. Each Emergency Food Hamper receives one litre of milk – more if there are children or lactating mothers in the household.
More often than not, milk is purchased by the Calgary Food Bank to fulfill its Hamper requirements because a milk donation isn’t the norm. The milk donation from the Rock Ridge Dairy will help as many as 800 households in Calgary, and save the Food Bank from having to purchase it outright.
More than 136,000 Calgarians received food from the Emergency Food Hamper Program delivered by the Calgary Food Bank in 2011.
Every year, more than 7 million kg of food gets distributed to the Calgarians in need and it takes more than 100 people volunteering every day at the food bank to make all that happen.
Hampers for the homeless provides two to three days of food for Calgarians with inadequate shelter.
Clients access these hampers through agency partners – the Aboriginal Friendship Centre, The Alex, Alpha House (DOAP Team), Canadian Red Cross, Catholic Charities, CMHA (SOS Program), CUPS, the Drop-In Centre, John Howard Society, Loft Program, Native Network, Salvation Army (Centre of Hope), Streetlight, Woods Homes (Exit Outreach and Forest Lawn Family Support).
Since this time last year, the Calgary Food Bank has experienced a 10 per cent increase in demand for these hampers, while seeing an 8 per cent decrease in Emergency Food Hampers, which is hopeful to the Food Bank as it appears that individual demand is decreasing while agency-affiliated demand is increasing. It would seem Calgarians are accessing the services they need to address to root causes of a lack of food.
Category: Calgary
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