4,591 Families.
That’s how many the Mount Arrowsmith Salvation Army Food Bank has served in just the first five months of this year. Last year’s total, for all twelve months, was 8,200.
Major Sergii Kachanov and his wife, Major Tatiana Kachanov, have led the Salvation Army’s work in Parksville and Qualicum Beach since 2016, after stints in Nanaimo, Surrey and Williams Lake. He told me they asked to come back to the island because they believed they still had things to do here.
We chatted on the Pulse Podcast, and Segii talked about seniors living in cars, about two-parent working families who still can’t stretch the money any further. “They do work,” he told me, “and they simply can’t cope with the rise in prices and the big increase in rent.”
The Mt. Arrowmith Food Bank operates on a points system and grocery store-style shopping model that lets people choose their own groceries with dignity rather than take whatever’s handed to them.
He also told me about Dmytro and Yana, two young volunteers who’ve become the heart of the operation. Dmytro, a refugee from Ukraine, used his own money to buy the food bank six printers, a power washer and electric scissors for the produce room. Yana built the food bank’s newsletters from scratch.
The need is real and so is the community stepping up to meet it.
If you’ve got food to donate, or a few hours to spare, the Mount Arrowsmith Food Bank on Wembley Road in French Creek would love to hear from you. Give the full conversation with Sergii a listen and you’ll come away with a better sense of what’s actually happening in our own backyard.
You’ll find the Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP42PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/