St. Catharines in Ontario's Niagara Region is not unlike other cities around the country when it comes to the high numbers of people using area food banks.

A new report shows 26 per cent of 1,515 Canadian adults polled indicate they are “extremely concerned about having enough income to cover their basic needs,” with seven per cent of respondents saying they have had to turn to food banks, food hampers or community meal programs, up from six per cent in October 2023.

Fed up with the growing food insecurity they see each day, chefs are teaming up with young cooking students to tackle the issue in Toronto with “Get Fed Up 2024.”  

While it might seem a good-news story that Good Shepherd Ministries served more than 1,200 meals to hundreds of grateful guests on Easter Sunday, it merely highlights a staggering trend in the rise of food bank usage in Toronto and beyond.

Leaders from the Yonge Street Mission (YSM) declared to over 200 Catholic Women’s League (CWL) members living in the Greater Toronto Area that they can all make a difference in the fight against hunger.

The Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) has opened St. Gemma Outreach School for students in vital need of extra support.

There is an adage that to get off the streets you need a home, a job and a friend. The reality is that there are not enough affordable homes, few jobs open to those who are homeless and even fewer friends who are willing to walk the harsh streets to sustain hope in the darkness. 

These are dangerously murky times. Passionate voices ring out all over; few listen to each other. We risk losing one another as forces pull and push us apart, like the sudden crush in a crowd, when people going different directions create forces by which some get suffocated and trampled. How can we find our way together amidst such forces?  

The aroma of caramelized onions, cumin and baked fish still lingers as volunteers busily fill hundreds of containers of meals for the poor.

In far off places, I’ve seen children under armed guard, fenced in, sitting in the dust, holding themselves up on the edges of human existence — exiled to places where any notion of the rights of children seems fanciful, even sadly comical.

War produces tremendous poverty, and its violence strikes those who are defenseless and vulnerable, Pope Francis said.

Calgary’s Feed the Hungry program will make its return to sit-down meals for those in need beginning Thanksgiving weekend, more than two years after it was turned on its head by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Seeing video footage of hungry families in agony breaks one’s heart,” Argaw Fantu writes in an e-mail from his home base in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Ethiopians, especially poor families in the war-devastated parts of the northern Tigray region, have been experiencing immense suffering from a conflict that remains largely unknown to Canadians. War started in the Tigray region in November 2020 between the Ethiopian National Defence Forces and the Tigray Defence Forces, and the conflict continues to this day.

It’s a hungry world and COVID has only sharpened those hunger pangs.