Sharing our 2022 Impact Report
Imagine a future where we can all access food the way we want to. What would it look like? What would it feel like?
These were the questions FoodShare posed to community in 2022 at workshops, online and through the Realised/Reimagined: Food is Our Right art exhibition. The responses were alive with possibility…
“Reducing the miles that our food has to travel — people can grow their own food on a balcony, roof or in a garden”
“Teach people how to harness and collect rainwater, and how to collect seeds. Seeds are life.”
Community kitchens, gardens, food forests, gatherings to eat together at all times of the day”
“Having a loving relationship with culturally relevant foods and our bodies”
“Land Back”
So many of the answers elicit visions not of some impossible and complex future, but a return to the past, to some of our earliest ways of knowing, grounded in the earth and in community. It’s clear that folks know what’s needed to make a just food future our reality. Evidence of that was all around us in 2022. In the pieces the local artists created for the exhibition that showed us what their corner of the world would look like if the human right to food was a reality. In the impacts of the Supportive Partnerships Platform that saw much-needed food and funds get to grassroots groups doing the work of providing dignified access to food for their communities. In the hundreds of people who lent their signatures to our petition to demand an updated food charter from the City of Toronto — one that will be developed in consultation with the communities most impacted by poverty and food insecurity.
You’ll find details on all of this and more in the pages of our 2022 Impact Report. It’s a chance to explore some of the year’s achievements and the team’s points of pride. Pausing to look back is important; it can inform us and energize us for the road ahead. Because there is so much that still needs to be accomplished to achieve a food just future for all.
While this is my last year as the Chair of FoodShare’s Board of Directors I look forward to watching on as the team at FoodShare continues to spark conversations, drive change and deliver programming designed to move our city forward, toward a Toronto where everyone will be able to feed themself, their loved ones and their community with dignity, and with joy.
In solidarity,
Crystal Sinclair
Outgoing Chair of the Board of Directors (2019-2022)
FoodShare Toronto