David Long, the CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, is seeing something new these days: the people who are visiting his food bank often have full-time jobs. They have decent salaries but spend the majority of their income on housing costs. Sometimes his food bank clients are gig workers. Sometimes they are teachers and nurses whose salaries don’t cover the cost of living. And every week, more people show up to the food bank than the week before.
When Long became CEO in 2019, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank was supporting 6,500 clients per month. That number has nearly tripled in just five years. In a painfully vivid account of what it’s like to run a food bank in the age of inflation and skyrocketing rents, Long describes how his supply chain operates, where his donations come from and how he has set up his Amazon-style warehouse equipped with multiple industrial fridges. “We run the GVFB like a business,” he says. “But our goal is the opposite of most businesses—we want our customer base to shrink. It breaks my heart to see things speeding in the opposite direction.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
