Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank has three major problems on its plate, as it heads into the holiday season.
The first has been the ongoing challenge of keeping up with increased demand in 2020, which CEO Neil Heatherington says is up 51 per cent year-over-year.
That's exacerbated by this upcoming December, the month when usually 50 per cent of its food is distributed to those in need.
The final factor is to meet public health guidelines, Heatherington said they've made the decision to put off their annual food drive events.
"It might mean not achieving the goal, it might mean not enough food coming into the Daily Bread," he said. "It's been the most difficult year we've ever experienced."
With no sign of need slowing this year, Heatherington said there's two targets for the end of the year: 400,000 pounds of food (about 17 tractor-trailers full) and the financial goal of $1 million to make that happen.
Despite the challenge, Heatherington said the public responded greatly to food needs during Thanksgiving, so the plea is for people to continue to bring in food individually, make orders through grocery retailers and obviously financial contributions.
"We're going to be able to leverage that, our purchasing power obviously is pretty significant," he said. "For every dollar of food that is donated, we're able to actually purchase much more than that."
There have been various instalments of federal assistance, as the bank received $2.3 million in funding to be spent on food distribution within six weeks.
As for Ottawa's announcement of more funding before the Thanksgiving weekend, the funds have not yet been received and it's unclear how it will be utilized, the bank said.
But Heatherington points out that along with the short term need, is the long-term one.
"If you look back to the 2008-09 recession, the highest amount of food bank usage actually came two years after that difficult fall," he said. "If past is prologue, then we are deeply concerned."
For those efforts, he suggests advocacy for policies on affordable housing and poverty reduction that will stem the need for banks like his.
But for now, he can't look past December.
"I have no doubt that we'll continue to meet the challenges ahead, which regrettably I think will be even more dark," he said.