Local families having a food emergency at Christmas will get a record amount of help from paramedics.
Prince George's crews from the B.C. Ambulance Service volunteered their time and stationed an ambulance in front of certain Save-On-Foods locations for four days of donations, spread out over the past two weekends. Shoppers would pass by and donate food and other staple goods into the back of the ambulance.
It has become an annual tradition to see the paramedics gathering food donations at the grocery stores in their Red and White Hunger Fight campaign. It began in 2006 and each year has set a new record, including this one. Co-founding paramedic Rob Pritchard said some individual stores had less response than past years, but there were upsurges at other locations. In the end they gathered approximately seven tonnes of food and other essentials.
All the food goes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for their distribution to the city's hungriest people.
"We had one of the street people we recognized from just being around in the community. He came up to us and said 'this is all I've got' and he fished two twoonies, a nickel and a dime out of his pocket," said Pritchard. "He insisted we take it. It was probably 100 per cent of his total financial worth, at least at the time, but he felt compelled to give it. Maybe he's had his buddies use the food bank, or maybe he has used it himself in the past, but he felt it was important to contribute. We were very touched. That's one of those unexpected things that takes your words away and really shows you how important the food shortage issue is."
During last December and January, the St. Vincent de Paul Society gave out more than 230 food hampers and there has been no reduction in the city's needs since then. The agency's executive director Bernie Goold said "this is definitely the biggest year" for donations from the paramedics' food drive and the society "is privileged" to turn those donations into carefully arranged boxes for the people who need food and supplies the most.
"This amount ensures we have hampers available into March-April," Goold said. "Poverty is 365 days a year, so this is very helpful not just for the two-week Christmas period. We are deeply, deeply grateful for the paramedics and all the personal time they put into this, and the organization and the care. Maclean's Magazine needs to be here to see this. This town has such generosity in its heart."
Pritchard and his fellow paramedics shared several stories of witnessing that Prince George generosity. Some people shopped until a couple of buggies were overflowing, then donated it all, taking nothing home for themselves. Some gathered food at home or at work and drove up to the ambulance to hand the charitable loot over. Some gave cash, like $1,000 from Enbridge, as well as the proceeds of a donation effort at the Bear Lake general store, and another $1,000 accumulated from other smaller money gifts.
The public is responding positively, said Pritchard, so plans were already underway to make next year's Red and White Hunger Fight even more helpful.
"Being a small post in the province, and having to maintain ambulance services, we hesitated to branch out too widely, but we came to the conclusion this year, after thinking about it for a while now, that we are going to have to go ahead and bring the food drive to the Hart Mall location as well and that would cover the whole city," he said.
That, according to Save-On-Food officials, would enable citywide advertising to be done by the grocery company, which has never been done before and might boost the campaign's profile.
"I think we can use our resources, too, and make next year bigger than it has ever been before," said Mike Jakubowski, one of the Save-On-Foods managers. "What the paramedics are doing has become a tradition in Prince George over the years."
