While these forms of poverty are real and terrible, this is not necessarily what poverty looks like in the Peace Region.
Poverty here can take many forms.
It can be the single mom trying to make ends meet for her children, who herself goes hungry to ensure her children can eat.
It could be a working class family of four, with clean clothes, and a house who are undergoing financial insecurity and unable to keep up on bills and groceries.
It can be a single person who came to the area for a better life, but is struggling to get in their feet. Or a senior neighbour who is unable to work, living on a meagre monthly income that makes paying for housing and food almost impossible.
Poverty here, is sometimes completely hidden.
In the Peace Region there are over 6,000 children alone facing poverty and inadequate access to healthy and consistent meals.
Programs like the Salvation Army Food Bank offers a glimpse of hope to those suffering silently with poverty. Through grants from the Community Foundation of Northwestern Alberta and donations from citizens of the Peace Region the Salvation Army is able to offer hampers of food to those in need.
For the food bank, the situation doesn’t matter. What is important is that nobody has to go to bed on an empty stomach. The Salvation Army food bank allows those who are struggling to provide themselves and their families with food, making difficult times a little easier by removing the worry of where their next meal will come from.
The Community Foundation believes that a community is made stronger by lifting up those in their society that are struggling. Through our multi-year partnership with the food bank, we are ensuring that nobody in the community has to silently suffer through hunger. By assisting the Salvation Army’s Food Bank program the Community Foundation hopes to nourish not only the people of the region, but the community as a whole. Building stronger more caring people, and encouraging the Peace Region to flourish.