The AMS Food Bank is collaborating with UBC Sprouts, the volunteer-run vegan café, on a new voucher system to provide meals to those experiencing food insecurity.
The vouchers, given to clients of the AMS Food Bank, are intended to provide more nutritious meals than the food bank can offer. Ian Stone, the AMS student services manager, said they’re planning to roll out the program this week.
“Oftentimes, quick, easy foods like canned food are not healthy, so we are exploring the opportunity to be able to provide something that is equally the quickest for our clients facing food insecurity on campus and healthy,” Stone said.
The program will provide vouchers of four different colours and styles to clients. Each voucher can be used to get an entrée with a side dish on weekdays between 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. at Sprouts’s location in the Life Building.
“They’re all worth the same amount. They're all good for a meal,” said Sprouts President Graham Matheson. “We’re not in the business of caring a lot about our bottom line. We’re in the business of feeding people.”
Stone and Matheson explained that people facing food insecurity are usually also burdened with other issues like tuition fees, long work hours and unaffordable housing. This initiative aims to take those various needs into account.
“It’s really hard being a student, it's really tough for a lot of students to have a balanced diet, to have time to access affordable food, [since] the price of food is going up and the quality is typically going down at the same time,” Matheson said.
“It’s great to see that there's some initiatives in place between us and the AMS to try and address people that really need food ... and could really benefit from our service.”
Fighting the stigma
According to Stone, the team is trying to make this program as “low-key” and as “low-barrier as possible” due to the existing stigma around food insecurity and food banks.
“There’s definitely a lot of stigma around food banks,” Matheson said. “Food banks aren’t meant to be permanent solutions to affordability issues with food. They’re stigmatizing because [the way] they're designed to be is like [a] handout.”
Tebby Leepile, a PhD student in integrated studies in land and food systems, says that food banks need to rebrand their concept in order to reduce the stigma.
“I think that oftentimes the stigma comes from … the use of food banks being associated with poverty — with a lack of a health, financial status or socio-economic status in general,” Leepile said. “I think that even though people are experiencing struggles, nobody wants to come out in the open and to show people that ‘Hey, by the way, I’m struggling.’”
Matheson noted that the vouchers will not have any markings on them indicating that they came from the AMS Food Bank.
“We really didn’t want to have a voucher that said this comes from the Food Bank because then people might be less likely to use it and people sometimes have a sense of shame around having to access food banks,” Matheson said.
“It just creates a sense of privacy for people who are accessing that service.”