Virtual donations driving spring food drive

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London Food Bank’s virtual drives grow donors, strengthen year-round giving

Halfway through its spring drive, the London Food Bank says Londoners have embraced its move to a virtual collection format.

Instead of traditional donations of foodstuffs, donors give money, which the food bank converts into food.

A switch forced in the fallout of the pandemic one year ago, it’s a change that’s led to more people overall making financial contributions.

“Overall, people have continued to give money virtually and there’s been an increase in monthly donors,” Jane Roy, the food bank’s co-executive director, said Wednesday.

“There has been a huge increase in the amount of financial donations over Thanksgiving, over Christmas and over the first few months of this year,” she said.

This year’s spring drive, which began March 26 and ends Monday, is the second one the food bank has held mainly virtually because of COVID-19.

This time around, putting together the annual campaign, which traditionally relied on brown paper collection bags delivered in The London Free Press, has been a smoother experience, Roy said.

“Like everybody else, we all panicked last year,” she said of the logistical challenges posed by the virus crisis last March.

“A lot of grocery stores, for example, took their (donation) bins away because of the concern of COVID transmission. Now, we were able to kind of figure out what those protocols are, so most of the grocery stores now have their bins back up.”

An added benefit of the increase in financial donations is that it allows the food bank to be more flexible in responding to the needs of the community by buying products as they’re needed, Roy said.

But she said the physical component of the drive, donating actual foodstuffs, won’t go away.

“There’s still that whole education component for kids of going grocery shopping and getting some food and putting it in the bin, and knowing exactly where it’s going,” Roy said.

Galvanized by the impact of the pandemic, last year’s spring drive was the most successful in the food bank’s history. It collected the equivalent of 85,591 kilograms of food, more than triple the 25,707 kgs brought in during the spring of 2019.

Roy said this year’s campaign is in line with pre-pandemic levels, but also comes after a year when Londoners increased their contributions to the bank.

As of Wednesday, the spring food drive had brought in the equivalent of 15,050 kgs of food through 4,575 kgs of donated foodstuffs and $60,041.95 in donations, worth another 10,474 kgs.