Groceries for Families

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St. Jude’s runs this weekly program in partnership with Food For Life to provide fresh food items to families living in the Community Housing Corporation of Halton complex, located at Margaret and Maurice Drives in Oakville.

Food For Life, a not-for-profit agency, provides the food, which is mostly fresh fruit and vegetables.

Every Wednesday at 12 Noon, approximately 15 volunteers meet at St. Jude’s to sort, allocate and bag the food items delivered by FFL; allocation of food is aligned to the number of people in each of our families.

Our volunteers then drive the groceries to the housing community, and working in pairs, deliver the groceries to each family. The deliveries are grouped into six “grocery delivery routes” based on address to ensure efficiency.

Volunteer time requirement each week is approximately 2 – 2.5 hours, and volunteers are asked to give their availability to the Program Coordinator who then creates six-week schedules to accommodate everyone’s availability.

COVID Update: To meet COVID protocols, Food For Life delivers pre-bagged grocery food items for the families to the main parking lot in the Margaret/Maurice Drives neighbourhood, where St. Jude’s volunteers meet to allocate and deliver the bags to each family in our program.

This has reduced volunteers’ weekly time commitment to one hour.

Groceries for Families is one of the programs set up through St. Jude’s Justice and Servant Ministry team. If you are interested in volunteering for this program or would like more information, please click the Volunteer Now button to be directed to a team member via the St. Jude’s office.

We encourage interested volunteers to “test drive” the program by volunteering one or two times prior to making a decision.