The Problem
Our community has had an influx of migrants and refugees over the past year. The migrants and refugees living in our community often rely heavily on our local food pantry. The problem is most of the food available in our food pantry is highly processed and doesn’t align with the cultural diversity of our community and the people using the food pantry. We believe it’s important that the food pantry carries a variety of healthy, locally produced/sourced, and culturally diverse food to better connect with the high number of migrants and refugees relying on the food pantry. This also aligns with the principles of food sovereignty. Some food currently available in the food pantry is unfamiliar to migrants and refugees, and we believe to help them better adjust to our community, foods from their culture/country should be available. Having culturally appropriate food available also aligns with the principles of food sovereignty. This could also benefit our community as a whole because this would spread more cultural awareness and introduce people to new and healthy food that they might not have tried otherwise.
