The Food Sharing Project expands into Kingston high school

The kitchen space inside Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic High School, which had been closed since the COVID-19 pandemic, will now serve as a new space for The Food Sharing Project’s Lunch is Ready program. The charity provides nutritious food to schools across Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington, all of which is funded mainly through Canada’s National School Food Program.

The program currently serves lunch to eight elementary schools in Limestone District School Board and the Algonquin Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, as well as 13 other schools that also receive large pans of shareable meals, all of which is cooked in their commercial kitchen.

The new space allows the program to not only serve meals twice a week to students at the high school, but also St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School and Molly Brant Public School.

“With one in four families in KFL&A experiencing food insecurity, and the nutritional gap between what families can provide and what kids need to thrive is widening every day,” said Brenda Moore, the chair of The Food Sharing Project. “Kids really count on the food that we’re providing them at school, and a great example of that happened this winter. You’ll remember we had a lot of days where the school buses were canceled due to weather. Usually, the kids that walk to school, they stay home too on those days. But we heard from a couple of our schools that the numbers were down to start the day, but by late morning, Numbers were up. Kids were coming to school because that’s where lunch was.”