8 Steps We're Taking Towards Dignified Food Access

By Mahjobeh Badakhsh, Programs Manager

Food Stash recently released a summary of our Food Justice work, outlining our commitment to creating positive social impact, shaped through conversations with our community. As part of our commitment to Food Justice, we’re moving away from just providing food aid and towards a more inclusive and equitable system that eliminates stigma, provides client choice and access to culturally relevant food, and is responsive to the unique and often evolving needs of the community we serve.

 

As defined by Roots to Harvest, Dignified Food Access means “providing quality food choices in a respectful way in welcome spaces.” At Food Stash, we understand the value of honouring and centering the voices and experiences of our community members in our work.

We make every effort to offer quality food to people, on their terms and in a respectful way, free of any stigma or judgement. We work to ensure each visitor of our public-facing space enters a welcoming environment where they are treated as our guests. We strive to foster dialogue and build relationships with our community members, working with the people we serve to shape our programs, practices and intended impact – and because dignified food access requires systemic change, we’re working to build our advocacy and educational capacities.

This post outlines a few of the internal and external practices that help us prioritize principles such as respect, dignity, trust and empathy in our work. While this is not an exhaustive list of all our practices, it’s also not indicative of an end to our learning journey. We’ll continue to have deeper conversations, learning from our community members, community partners and each other, asking how we can improve to offer a more dignified food access experience for our community members in need of support.

Our Practices:

    • Our Rescued Food Boxes are packed according to our members’ cultural and dietary needs or preferences. In providing client choice, we’re also encouraging our members to create nutritious and culturally appropriate recipes, eliminating added stress associated with receiving unknown or unfamiliar food items and reducing the chances of food being wasted.

    • Our Rescued Food Market is stocked with a range of nutritious, surplus food from farms, grocers and wholesalers. The market welcomes everyone regardless of socio-economic status and provides an opportunity for people to make their own food choices

    • Through our Food Recovery program, we provide a range of healthy, rescued food items to our Community Partners. By distributing 80% of the food we rescue to 30+ other nonprofits, we serve a broad diversity of communities and aid in providing healthy, culturally appropriate food options through their various hot meal, market and food hamper programs.

    • While our weekly Rescued Food Boxes have an estimated true value of over $100, program members pay $10 per box. The $10 fee encourages member engagement, honest feedback and dignity, by eliminating any stigma associated with receiving food aid. The fee also serves as a reminder of our commitment to accountability, authenticity, respect and overall good customer service.

    • The Rescued Food Market uses a ‘pay what you feel’ model, where people choose the food items they want and if/how much they’d like to donate. The market serves as a place to celebrate food and promote an equitable circular economy and does not ask customers to provide any proof of their need. By welcoming all community members into the Marketspace to celebrate food and through the use of food waste discourse, Food Stash aims to enable greater social inclusion and destigmatize food aid, eliminating any stigma associated with not being able to afford the rising cost of food.

    • As our first public-facing space and program, our Rescued Food Market was designed with the safety and dignity of our customers in mind. We’re regularly reviewing and improving the layout and structure of the Market, making sure each Market user has fair and safe access to the selection of food available.

    • Community members are welcomed by colourful murals on the walls and an uplifting music playlist as they walk into the space. Signage translated into the most commonly spoken languages in our community can be found throughout the Market, welcoming customers and providing them with information on how the market operates.

    • They’re also greeted by our staff and volunteers, who are there to provide assistance when needed. Food Stash staff and volunteers understand the importance of customer service and hospitality; our customers are treated as guests in our space and we strive to provide a pleasant shopping experience.

    • Through a collaboration with the Office of Regional and International Community Engagement at UBC, we’re developing a Community-Based Participatory Research project to engage community members who have lived experiences of accessing food supports, to understand their perceptions of food access and needs within the community.

    • If we want to provide dignified access to food support and prioritize the health and wellbeing of our community members, we need to understand people’s lived experiences and learn how to respond to them. By engaging the community this way, we also build mutual respect and trust, and community members can shape our food programs and services in a way that best meets their unique needs.

    • While working to provide a more dignified experience to our service users, we need to recognize, actively support and advocate for policies that support a transition to a just and sustainable food system that ensures the human right to food. Everyone deserves to access healthy food in a dignified way, and we can only collectively guarantee this across all our communities by addressing the root causes of food insecurity and achieving lasting, systemic change.

    • With the help of the Vantage Point's Change Network, we’ve gained the skills and tools required to undertake public policy advocacy. We will continue to pursue our commitment to growing our advocacy and educational capacities and supporting existing initiatives leading the way to a more sustainable, just and equitable food system.

    • We’re intentional about the way we communicate and engage with our community. By using person-centred and inclusive language in our programs and throughout our work, we respect the dignity, worth and unique qualities of every individual.

    • The language we use respects and includes all communities while avoiding exclusionary vocabulary, biases and stereotyping. We put people first and our community members are not labelled by their situation or circumstances.

    • Before we can provide dignified experiences and interactions to our community members, we need to ensure we’re providing a workspace that is inclusive, safe and welcoming for all team members. We’re building mental health into our work culture and have undergone anti-oppression and cultural safety training.

    • We’ve worked with various academic institutions and recently, Bakau Consulting, to enhance our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and understand how staff and volunteers experience the workplace environment. We’re also educating our staff on trauma-informed practices because by understanding the impacts of trauma, we can better empathize with each other and the people we serve.

    • By partnering and collaborating with other support providers in our community, not only are we helping our community members get access to the food they need, but supporting them in finding more places to build relationships, have their voices heard, fulfil a sense of community, and connect to other services and resources.

    • Through effective collaboration and thinking more holistically, we help meet our community members’ complex and intersecting needs, while providing safe access to our own food programs.