One year of supporting local families in need with our Direct Giving Program.
We launched our Direct Giving Program a year ago - a huge team effort coordinated in time for the holidays, and a project we hope more than anything to continue growing. With the help of incredible local nonprofits and the generosity of Lufavores, we’ve helped 541 individuals struggling with food insecurity this year, by providing them direct access to fresh, local, responsible baskets every week. Over the course of the past year, Lufavore contributions totalled nearly $250,000, and we delivered over 4000 baskets to program recipients. We owe immense thanks to all the Lufavores who donated in this first year - be it once, weekly, monthly, or with their end-of-year credits.
When we started this project, we had one goal in mind: make fresh food more accessible. What we came up with was a program that would run with no overhead cost, use our own infrastructure, and allow 100% of all contributions to go directly to feeding those in need.
Our local nonprofit partners connect families with the Direct Giving Program, and each family receives $25 a week per family member to spend on the Marketplace (drawn from Lufavore contributions) plus a 50% discount on all fruits and vegetables. We started by supporting 100 families with four organizations, and we’ve since been able to grow the program to 135 families (that's 240 adults and 301 kids) with seven organizations. Read more here about the organizations we’re working with and the families they help us support.
We believe that this is the absolute best and most impactful way we can all come together to contribute to our local community. The feedback from West Island Mission below says it all.
And now we need help to support the program for another year.
"Before this program, I could never, ever imagine that my family and I would be able to eat that many vegetables. It has really changed our lives.”
For this mother of five, whose family came here from a rural village in Cameroon, eating local in Quebec never felt like an option before. “In my country, you know every little farm and farmer, but here it was quite different and really expensive - plus you don’t even know where it comes from. But with Lufa Farms, everything changed.”
“When you don’t have very much money, you’ll only buy what you know, but with Lufa Farms we were able to try a little bit of everything. And with the description of every farm, we really feel like we are actually speaking with the farmers through the website. It makes us feel like part of the family and part of Quebec.”
- R.T., member of West Island Mission and recipient of weekly baskets via our Direct Giving Program in 2021.
