Our Focus

Food insecurity, known as the inability to access to food due to financial constraints, is a serious and growing problem in Canada. While lack of money to buy food is the single greatest cause of food insecurity, it can be made worse by geographic location, health status, access to social supports, knowledge barriers, and structural racism.

Our goal is to work collaboratively with charitable organizations, the private sector, and governments to see moderate and severe food insecurity across Canada reduced by 50% by 2030.

The Centre supports the development of long-term strategies that can help overcome barriers to food security and reduce food insecurity for people across Canada. We invest in innovative research, collaborative learning, and impactful scale-oriented projects that seek to understand what is and isn’t effective at reducing food insecurity in Canada. We recognize the need for systems change to achieve our population-level goal and believe this will require a combination of top-down policy change and bottom-up programming and community-level supports. We know that this level of impact requires efforts from multi-sectoral actors including business, governments, civil society, non-profit organizations, academics, and advocates.

Some ideas we’re exploring and supporting that may reduce food insecurity:

• Food prescriptions which improve health and wellbeing
• Food subsidy programs integrated within housing and community organizations to support easier financial and physical access to food
• Fulltime traditional hunter and harvester programs to improve access to country foods in Canada’s remote regions
• Supportive job training programs that reduce the financial gap between social assistance and employment income
• Wrap-around services integrated within food bank and community health settings to connect people and families with supports for the root causes of food insecurity
• Indigenous-led collaboratives that support remote and reserve communities to build food sovereignty via food-related projects and traditional knowledge of cultural food practices
• Tax filing and benefits assistance to ensure food-insecure individuals and families are gaining access to the governmental financial supports

Some of the policy efforts we’re advocating for at the Federal level:

• Encouraging cross-government collaboration through a united target to reduce food insecurity by 50% by 2030, including the eradication of severe food insecurity and alleviating the disproportionate impact on Black and Indigenous Peoples
• The prompt implementation of an equitable federal Canada Disability Benefit to provide people with disabilities with needed financial support
• The implementation of a universal national school food program to support children’s immediate access to food

To catch the latest from our team, check out our latest blog posts and news releases.

To learn more about the work we fund, read about our partners and their projects.