Canada AM's Jeff Hutcheson will be broadcasting live from Owen Sound on Wednesday, November 30th to celebrate the city's community spirit and generosity in regards to the Kraft Food for Families.
Kraft launched the program initially to be three months long - focused on helping 30 local food banks across Canada to raise donations via online signatures, which would go towards addressing their capacity issues and long-term needs like freezers, storage, new facilities, and delivery trucks.
The response from Canadians was incredible. After just eight days of the program being live, they reached their goal, early, of 50,000 online signatures. This means $50,000 has been given to food banks across the country, dollar by dollar through the signature of Canadians—the support has been so passionate from the communities involved.
Owen Sound blew it out of the water. They raised over 22,000 online signatures in just one week, from their small community of 21,753 people. They had support from the whole community, through media and word of mouth.
They will get an additional $10,000 for their efforts to go towards their capacity needs, which include a new space for the food bank in January, new freezers to store food from local farmers who donate throughout the year, and supplies to prepare their food bank for emergency as part of the town's emergency preparedness.
The outstanding response demonstrates that long-term resource needs of food banks are an issue that communities in Canada care about.
Canada AM is visiting Owen Sound to talk about how a community of just over 20,000 people raised the same amount of online signatures in support of their food bank in just eight days. Kraft will present their $10,000 cheque – in addition to the $22,000 they will receive – live on the show.
Jeff Hutcheson will be doing his hits for this show at the Harry Lumley Bayshore Community Centre in hopes the entire town will come to celebrate.
