The 25-year mark is one most organizations are pleased to hit.

Orillia’s Sharing Place food bank, on the other hand, would prefer to close its doors.

The Sharing Place, which opened March 7, 1989, is serving more people in more ways than ever before — by providing education and programs that encourage independence from the food bank.

“We’ve assessed what’s going on in the community and we’re trying to adapt with the community as the community change. The needs are changing so we’re changing along with them,” Hager said.

The industrial landscape in Orillia has shifted over past decade, she said, and good-paying jobs are being lost.

Three or four years ago, the manufacturing sector took a hit when concrete company Atlas Block left town and a few others cut back on operations, Stephanie Stanton, president of the Orillia Manufacturers Association, said.

But the manufacturing sector is not the only one affected, she pointed out. Other large local employers, like Teletech, have had a lot of ebb and flow in the past few years.

“I think there may be a piece to a fact that the cost of living in general has increased and average families are finding it hard to make ends meet,” Stanton said.

While in the mid-‘90s, the Sharing Place served about 2,400 people per year, according to it’s records, last year, it served nearly 17,000 — and about one third were children.

To try to keep up with the growing demand, the Sharing Place is morphing from an emergency-food outlet into a community food centre.

The Sharing Place promotes local food policy and community gardening through initiatives such as Growing Orillia’s Food Future and Gardens to Groceries. One third of its clients are children, so last year it launched a brown-bag lunch program.

Georgie McDonald has been volunteering at the Sharing Place from day one. She remembers when it was up a flight of stairs above the Chinese restaurant at 24 Mississaga St. E.

“It’s just grown and grown,” said McDonald, who followed the organization to Victoria Street, Dunedin Street and finally its current location at 22 West St. S.

There’s a misconception that people who use on the food bank also rely on social assistance, Hager said.

That may have been the case in the early days, she continued, but it definitely isn’t now.

The Sharing Place began keeping electronic records of its clients last year.
“It turns out that a substantial portion of them have college and university degrees,” Hager said.

While McDonald said there are some clients who have been coming to the food bank as long as she has — “It’s become a way of life,” she said — she remembers an embarrassed local high-school teacher coming in one day.

She said he told her his mortgage and all of his bills had come due and he couldn’t afford to buy food.

“You wouldn’t expect it,” she said of his visit. “But it can happen to anyone.”

Orillia has always been divided into haves and have-nots, but when the national economy began to spiral downward in the mid 2000s, those who had been struggling to get by on their own no longer could, said Hager’s predecessor, Don Evans, who stepped in to help the food bank around that time.

The Sharing Place is a reflection of the community, he said, and without it, Orillia would really be in trouble.

Hager said the problem is growing across Canada as a result of federal policy.

“Food assistance is a Band-Aid solution to what’s going on. We need to discuss the root cause behind all of this and that’s a pretty complex conversation because that involves poverty and unemployment,” she said.

“There doesn’t seem to be any type of support to make any substantial changes. We have to start demanding from our federal government that they do something. Start supporting the people that live in Canada.”

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According to Food Banks Canada’s nationwide 2013 HungerCount report: 

• 9.4 per cent of people access a food bank for the first time each month
• 3.64 per cent of those turning to food banks are children and youth
• 4.3 per cent of adults helped are over age 65
• 11.3 per cent of people are aboriginal
• 56 per cent of households helped receive social assistance
• 11.5 per cent have income from current or recent employment
• 16.4 per cent receive disability-related income supports
• 8 per cent of food banks ran out of food during the survey period
• 50 per cent of food banks needed to cut back on the amount of food provided to each household