Anyone been hearing as much about Stop Community Food Centre?
This is what they are about taken right off their website.
The Stop Community Food Centre strives to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds community and challenges inequality.
What We Do
The Stop has two locations: at our main office at 1884 Davenport Road we provide frontline services to our community, including a drop-in, food bank, perinatal program, civic engagement, bake ovens and markets, community cooking, community advocacy, sustainable food systems education and urban agriculture. The Stop’s Green Barn, located at 601 Christie Street, is a sustainable food production and education centre which houses a greenhouse, food systems education programs, a sheltered garden, community bake oven and compost demonstration centre.
Philosophy
We believe that healthy food is a basic human right. We recognize that the ability to access healthy food is often related to multiple issues and not just a result of low income. At The Stop, we’ve taken a holistic approach to achieve real change in our community’s access to healthy food.
We strive to meet basic food needs and, at the same time, foster opportunities for community members to build mutual support networks, connect to resources and find their voices on the underlying causes of hunger and poverty.
A key tenet of The Stop's approach is that community members must be involved in making decisions about how our organization operates. When program participants are involved -- as front-line volunteers, program advisory committee members, gardeners or cooks -- the stigma associated with receiving free food is often diminished or erased. While our food access programming helps confront the issue of hunger, it also creates opportunities for community members to forge their own responses to hunger. We believe this approach will end the way charity divides us as a society -- the powerful and the powerless, the self-sufficient and the shamed. At The Stop, we are creating a new model to fight poverty and hunger: a community food centre.
I checked out their events calendar to see if there was a way for me to go get involved and get a first hand taste for what they are all about. In their October calendar they listed this amazing event I would love to check out.
FROM THE GROUND UP LECTURE & SUNDAY SUPPER (WITH RAJ PATEL & JAMIE KENNEDY), OCT 17
The Gardiner Museum's annual lecture features this year the award-winning writer, activist and academic, Raj Patel. Best known for his New York Times bestseller, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel has worked for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, and is now an outspoken critic of all three.
Recent arguments suggest that local food, with its reliance on small-truck transport from producer to market, produces more carbon dioxide emissions than much of the food shipped huge distances. For the 2010 From the Ground Up lecture presented by Robert Rose Inc., Mr. Patel will offer a passionate defense that local food is the preferable alternative. Once the true (and often hidden) costs of global food production are accounted for, it becomes clear that local food has far fewer economic, social and environmental negative impacts.
Following the lecture, Raj Patel will welcome guests to Sunday Supper at the Gardiner. Chef Jamie Kennedy will offer a delicious three-course meal that celebrates the fall harvest and pays tribute to the tradition of Sunday supper, the comforting ritual that brings family and friends together to celebrate connections around delicious home-cooked food.
Where: Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen's Park
When: Sunday, October 17, 2:30 pm (lecture); 5 pm (Sunday Supper)
How much: Lecture only $10 ($8.50 for students); Lecture and Sunday Supper $200 (or $150 each for 3 or more). To purchase tickets, please visit the Gardiner Museum website
BTW Raj Patel has a blog you can check out as well. This guy seems like someone really worth listening to.
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