by Erin Innes As the holiday season approaches, the people of Powell River open our hearts and wallets to hamper drives and other charity acts aimed at relieving hunger in our community. It shows we are a compassionate community that cares deeply for one another, and that’s something to be proud of.
While we can and should ease the burden of hunger in the short term, we also can’t allow the temporary relief that charity brings to replace a longterm collective strategy to end hunger and poverty in our community.
Poverty is bigger than individuals and our personal choices, and individual generosity is not enough to put an end to it. We need to understand how hunger fits into the mesh of social factors that contribute to poverty, and the policies that have led us here.
More and more of us find ourselves in part-time, temporary or contract work with little security and no benefits. Much of this is driven by privatization and contracting-out of our public sector, and the erosion of legislative protections for workers at provincial and federal levels.
At the same time, increasing concentration of property ownership into the hands of investors and corporations pushes up the cost of housing. This leaves less and less of our money left over for feeding our families. And the shameful attitude of miserliness and victim-blaming that shapes our public safety net turns support programs into a trap instead of a way out of poverty.
These and many other drivers of hunger and poverty do have solutions, and we have the power to address many of them at a community level. Rent control. Taxing luxuries like second homes and vacation properties to fund rent banks and social housing. Guaranteed basic income. Providing access to land and a living wage for people who want to grow food, not for maximum profit, but to feed our community.
So many amazing initiatives work on providing good food to our community in ways that encourage participation, self-determination and dignity, including Community Resource Centre’s demonstration garden, Young Adult Community Kitchen, Good Food Box, and many others.
These projects run mostly or entirely on volunteers, with little to no funding or resources. Imagine what we could do to end hunger in our community if we put as many resources into long-term food security solutions as we put into collecting cans of food at Christmastime?
We don’t need to look to provincial or federal governments or outside investors and corporate saviours to begin addressing hunger and poverty in our community. But we do need to first understand poverty is not a force of nature. It’s a result of policies and structures created by people, and policies and structures can be changed to address it.
This community has a big heart, and we owe it to ourselves and one another to ask how we can better act on it so our community can live and eat well, at Christmas and all year round.
Erin Innes is an organic farmer and food activist who lives in Lund.
