In case of an emergency, Thunder Bay now has a plan to ensure everyone has access to food

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught communities a lot of things, but a big lesson in Thunder Bay, Ont., was the need for emergency planning around food security.

The city has ratified its first emergency food plan, a framework for determining how people's food needs will be met in times of crisis, from wildfires to floods or another pandemic.

The work has been led by the Thunder Bay and Area Food Strategy (TBAFS), alongside the city and nine non-profit organizations that form the community's essential food access infrastructure:

• Canadian Red Cross.
• Dew Drop Inn.
• Lakehead Social Planning Council.
• Northwestern Ontario Women's Centre.
• Salvation Army.
• Regional Food Distribution Association (RFDA).
• Roots Community Food Centre.
• Thunder Bay District Health Unit.
• Thunder Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre.

The idea for the plan dates back to late 2020, when TBAFS began researching local food access and found gaps in the community's pandemic response.

"A lot of our community organizations who are on the front lines of food access started having their own sort of ad hoc response to this emergency because we didn't have a common planning table to support emergency food response," said Courtney Strutt, the TBAFS's emergency food plan co-ordinator.

"What really came out of that was an understanding that deeper collaboration is needed."

How it works

The plan, which will complement the city's existing emergency plan, serves Thunder Bay and Fort William First Nation, as well as six surrounding municipalities as requested.

Essentially, it identifies potential risks that could lead to food service disruptions and outlines four severity levels that would determine the type of emergency food response that should be activated. It then provides a general roadmap for a structured response involving emergency responders and community partners.

While it's impossible to plan for every situation, the intention is to know who is responsible for what and how partners will work together to ensure no one is left hungry, said Strutt.

She said it's all about "working together, sharing resources, not competing for resources and making sure that people don't fall through the cracks."

"Having a wide breadth of understanding of the folks who face chronic food insecurity in our community every day and then the other subset of folks that become food insecure because of an emergency — that network of organizations really helps with that understanding."

The plan also outlines guidelines to deactivate the emergency food response and debrief with partners afterwards.

Ongoing food crisis

Brendan Carlin, the community services and sustainability manager with the RFDA, said there are benefits to having a co-ordinated approach that incorporates knowledge from a wide range of actors.

"We'll be updating it [the emergency food plan] as we go. We're going to keep meeting and keep finetuning if you will, and then hope we never need it," Carlin said during the plan's ratification event at the Roots Community Food Centre on Monday.

The RFDA serves around 2,500 unique individuals in Thunder Bay alone, with upwards of 9,000 to 12,000 people across the region in northwestern Ontario, according to executive director Volker Kromm. Like many other food providers, the RFDA is receiving fewer donor dollars as people have less cash to spare.

The number of people who used Ontario food banks rose 38 per cent last year, according to a report released this week by Feed Ontario. It's the largest single-year increase recorded by the province's food bank network.

It can be hard to find the time to prepare for a wide-scale emergency when more food bank clients show up at your door daily, said TBAFS co-ordinator Sarah Siska.

"There is an ongoing crisis for food insecurity in the community, and so a lot of these organizations are already strapped. They're under-resourced, they're understaffed, underserviced, and so there's a lot of people who should be at the table that don't have the capacity to be there," Siska said.

"You can send out however many emails you want and calls, but if someone's really doing front-line work, sometimes they just don't have the time to pick up the phone, so there is a lot of relationship building that has to go into this, and the emergency food plan is an amazing step."

Community partners ran an extreme heat event simulation on Monday to put the plan to the test. They'll do that each year so the plan is well maintained and updated as needed.

"It was realistic, which was important, but it was also a basis for all kinds of emergencies. You can't really plan for everything, but you can be prepared and consider as many variables as possible," Carlin said.

A novel approach

Strutt said TBAFS would be happy to share its process for developing an emergency food plan with other communities "because this is work that needs to happen everywhere."

All funding and resources required for the emergency food plan came from within Thunder Bay, she added.

"I think that's also something for us to be proud of and to inspire other communities, that it didn't take a ton of money to do this," Strutt said.

"It took a lot of commitment and it took a lot of people being willing to come around the table in good faith, and it can be done in other places."