During the cold snap of February 2024, I met with a gentleman – I’ll call Mike – in a community centre in the South of Calgary where he was hanging out during the day trying to stay warm. I had come to chat with him about the impact that the Calgary Food Bank had had on his life. He told me that he had worked as a decorator, but following a climbing accident, he had suffered a brain injury and since then had struggled to maintain work, and consequently, housing.
He had been relying on the Calgary Food Bank for food for the past several years. He was currently unhoused, and we had to end the interview early because he needed to go, on foot, to reserve a bed for the night at one of Calgary’s homeless shelters. This story, while heartbreaking, is unfortunately becoming all the more common. For example, our frontline staff are interacting with more and more individuals who, with a bit of prompting, reveal they are living in their vehicles.
This is an indictment of the harsh economic circumstances – including the rising costs of housing and food – coupled with increasing gaps in the social safety net. In collaboration with the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, we sought to investigate the empirical relationship between food insecurity and homelessness. Professor Ron Kneebone led a database matching project, where he linked anonymized data from the Calgary Food Bank with anonymized data from the Calgary Homeless Foundation (CHF).
The researchers were interested in those who had entered the homeless shelter system for the first time between January 1, 2012 and September 29, 2023 and identified 12,246 single individuals and 2,113 families in the CHF’s sample for whom this was the case. Of those, 63% of single individuals and 60% of families had accessed the Calgary Food Bank in the five years prior to entering the homeless shelter system. This communicates a powerful message about the interconnection between housing and food insecurity: the majority of those accessing Calgary’s homeless shelter system have also utilized the Calgary Food Bank.