Shereen Ibrahim began volunteering at Agincourt Community Services Association’s food bank in 2016, two years after losing her husband and her job.

But when her money ran out last year, the 40-year-old Scarborough mother of three started relying on the food bank to feed her family.

“It helps because the food is so expensive now,” she says. “I can’t afford rent. The money from the government is not even covering the rent.”

Ibrahim is among 650 people who use the food bank at Dorset Park Community Hub at on Kennedy Rd.

In late July, however, donations to the food bank dropped, and Agincourt Community Services Association shared photos of its bare shelves on social media and with community members to raise awareness.

Neil Forester is one of the people who received the photos.

“It just broke my heart,” the co-founder of Substance Cares said.

Seeing those empty shelves prompted Forester and his friends, George Scorsis and Gavin Bryan, to help the food bank in the neighbourhood they all grew up in. The trio, who were assisted by Forester’s business partner Xavier Pinto, not only donated to the food bank themselves, but they reached out to friends, relatives and prominent business owners to do the same and offered to pick up the food if needed.

“Xavier drove around the city to individuals and houses. Additionally, friends donated cash (and) we had a team of extreme couponers utilize the donations and maximize them,” Scorsis, an entrepreneur who serves as strategic adviser to multiple boards and organizations, said in an email.

“Lastly, corporations like Chairman Brands stepped in and made food donations.”

As a result, multiple truckloads of food were donated to the food bank over the last few weeks.

“The fundamentals of who we are as individuals are really innately built around what Scarborough gave us as children,” said Scorsis. “Candidly, it was our duty to come back and help.”

Lee Soda, executive director of Agincourt Community Services Association, said donations to the food bank typically dip during the summer months.

“A lot of children do food drives for our food bank, so when school is out, typically those drives are not happening,” Soda said. “We are quite accustomed to see food bank donations drop, but we had gotten to a point at the beginning of August where the shelves were quite bare, and it became worrisome for us.”

Soda said the food bank shelves are now filled thanks to the efforts of the entrepreneurs.

“(It’s) the beauty of community coming together,” she said, noting it’s important for people to recognize that people use food banks all-year round, not just at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Soda added there is no typical profile of a food bank recipient.

“We have people that don’t look very different than you and I … Certainly we do have seniors on a fixed income or on pensions that access our food bank, but we have university graduates, we have two-parent working families who work minimum wage jobs,” she said. “The reality for a lot of people working minimum wage jobs is that after you pay for the roof over your head, there really is very little left over for anything else, including food.”

Soda stressed there’s “a huge stigma” attached to being a food bank recipient.

“One of the things that I also like to tell people is that when I go grocery shopping at my grocery store of choice, I get to choose what goes into my cart,” she added. “Unfortunately, if you are a food bank recipient, you get in your box of goods whatever we have on the shelf. We offer some choice but not very much.”

Forester said he hopes his food drive initiative, which he described as just a small step, will encourage others to support the food bank or other worthy causes in the city.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The food bank’s summer woes aren’t unique.

Amanda King, director of communications and research at Feed Ontario, a registered charity that represents food banks across the province, said that last summer there were 789,000 visits to Ontario’s food banks.

“The need remains the same. Sometimes it goes up a little, sometimes it goes down a little, but on average it remains the same and donations to food banks drastically drop,” she said. “The need is certainly significant and it really remains consistent year round.”

With files from Aaron D’Andrea