Trick Or Eat, the national food drive spearheaded by the on-campus Meal Exchange chapter, took place this past Halloween, Oct. 31, 2015.
Students and community members who signed up for the event joined one of two large groups that headed to different Guelph neighbourhoods to trick-or-treat for non-perishable food instead of candy.
The groups who signed up to canvas the communities were also fundraising under the slogan “Raise Food, Funds and Voices.” Participants will continue to canvassing their Facebook feeds, friends, and relatives for donations until Nov 9. Trick Or Eat drives take place across Canada. The self-titled “Trick-or-Eaters” go door-to-door, collecting food to donate to local community organizations. The Guelph event, run from campus, donates collected food to the on-campus CSA Foodbank.
According to the Guelph-specific event page on the Trick Or Eat website, “since 2012, the on campus food bank […] has witnessed their number of users double.”
The increase of food bank users is attributed to increased tuition costs, as well as a spike in the general cost of living in the city.
According to the website, the Guelph chapter was able to collect 44,000 pounds of food in 2014.
Any extra funding collected by Trick-or-Eaters will go towards supplementing the collected food donations and will also be used to support various community programs.
Since Trick Or Eat is a youth-run program, much of the collected food goes straight back to the vibrant communities that surround the areas with a strong enough youth population to run the event. According to a 2012 report on household food insecurity in Canada, one in eight Canadian households do not have access to enough food every month to maintain a healthy diet—approximately 1.7 million households across the country. In 2014, statistics from Food Banks Canada revealed that almost 850,000 Canadians receive food from a food bank every month and more than a third of those who receive support are children.
The kinds of statistics cited about food bank usage and the inherent need for them to exist make programs like Trick Or Eat important, and helpful, to organizations tasked with collecting the kinds of vast donations needed to support people in need.
The initial feedback from Saturday’s Trick Or Eat has been quite positive. The Guelph page appears to have set a goal of raising $30,000 and, at the time of writing, that bar is only at $500.