This is part of our Healthy Communities Initiative series, showcasing how the $31 million investment from the Government of Canada is supporting communities as they create and adapt public spaces to respond to the new realities of COVID-19.
During the pandemic, Kendra Strauss, a professor at Simon Fraser University, started volunteering at Red Cedar Café: a volunteer-run, not-for-profit community food program which opened in direct response to COVID-19.
Feeling isolated while working from home, Strauss was looking for a community, as well as a way to “[contribute] to solutions at a time when a lot of people were really struggling,” she says.
Based in Victoria, British Columbia, Red Cedar Café opened its doors in April 2020. “[The organization] was spearheaded by the original board and community members,” Strauss says, with the goal of supporting those hardest hit by economic downturn. Founders include food industry professionals and community leaders like City Councilor Ben Isitt and social justice advocate Liz Maze.
The organization set up shop in a former motel space that the province had purchased for social housing. At first, people were able to come to the physical space to grab food or dine-in — but before long, pandemic restrictions made it “harder and harder for people to actually come in person,” Strauss says.
“[The funding] puts an emphasis on offering solutions to community needs that are really found in the community,” Strauss says. “We really saw a good fit there.”
Around the same time, Victoria’s City Council put BC Housing under a great deal of pressure to provide emergency housing: pre-pandemic, it’s estimated that there were 24 to 35 temporary shelters in Victoria. As of April 2020, that number leaped to 465.
In response, Red Cedar pivoted to provide meals to unhoused community members. By the time Strauss started volunteering in the kitchen, Red Cedar had pivoted again, launching a new program that delivered frozen meals to people isolated at home during COVID-19.
Strauss says that Red Cedar used donated food “that would have otherwise gone to landfill.” Priority was given to vulnerable community members like low-income households or those living with disabilities.
Staying Afloat
To solidify Red Cedar’s programming, Strauss worked with staff to explore grant opportunities. That’s when she came across the Healthy Communities Initiative (HCI) funding, distributed by Community Foundations of Canada and local community foundations.
The HCI funds grassroots-led solutions for creating safe and vibrant public spaces during COVID-19, as well as innovative digital solutions for keeping communities connected. With $128,010 in HCI funding, Red Cedar was able to create a safe, accessible and inclusive public space in downtown Victoria where all community members could dine safely. When COVID-19 measures meant that the café had to close to the public, the HCI funding allowed the organization to create meals for delivery. It also went towards hiring a new staff position for its Free Store program, distributing no-cost groceries from surplus donations.
Red Cedar was founded on the idea of “responding at a grassroots level to a grassroots need,” Strauss says — which is the core value of HCI. “[The funding] puts an emphasis on offering solutions to community needs that are really found in the community,” Strauss says. “We really saw a good fit there.”
“We know that when we run out of meals on a weekly basis, that there are people who don’t get them,” Strauss says. “We would really like to be able to ensure that everybody who wants a meal can get them.”
Constant pivoting
But even with new funding, Red Cedar still faces numerous challenges with COVID-19. “Vaccine passports were a big issue,” Strauss says. “Unhoused communities don’t have access to vaccine passport technology on their phones, or aren’t vaccinated.”
Red Cedar has to constantly pivot its model. “We’ve opened the café, we’ve closed the café,” Strauss says. “We’ve been able to have people in the space to make use of things like free WiFi and phone charging, but then at other times, we’ve had to shut that down.”
Throughout these fluctuations, Red Cedar has prioritized its frozen meal program and Free Store, as a way of tackling food insecurity without having people in the space itself.
“[The programs] meet folks where they’re at, without [being] subject to all the restrictions that we’ve had in B.C.,” she says.
To make things as easy as possible, and to ensure community members are treated with respect and dignity, Red Cedar provides meals with no questions asked. “We don’t want our services to be in any way tested,” Strauss says, forgoing “[the] onerous processes of registering or proving need.”
The impact is evident: every week, Red Cedar’s frozen meal program offers four or five entrées, as well as fruit, bread, salads and coffee. People can order by phone or online. “We often find that the meals are totally gone within an hour or two,” Strauss says, adding that it’s around 1000 meals. “It’s a very high level of demand in the community.”
Building for the future
Despite Red Cedar’s good work, the cost of living and inflation keeps rising in Victoria — meaning food insecurity keeps rising, too. “The biggest barrier that we face is just that we can’t produce enough meals for everybody who needs them,” Strauss says.
That’s where funding like the HCI can support. “The [funding] has been really, really fundamental to our ability to continue our programs in the last six months,” Strauss says. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if we would have been able to keep our doors open without it.”
She adds that the HCI funding allowed Red Cedar to pivot in the way that it needed to: “we know that our community would have really felt the loss of those programs if we hadn’t had that support.”
Looking further ahead, Strauss hopes that the programs will expand, too, supporting even more individuals — a goal that can be made a reality with additional community-level funding.
“We know that when we run out of meals on a weekly basis, that there are people who don’t get them,” Strauss says. “We would really like to be able to ensure that everybody who wants a meal can get them.”
(Credit for all photographs in this story: Sharon Kelly)
