A busy summer is expected to continue at The Gathering Place Soup Kitchen.

Executive Director Dennis Chippa tells BayToday on top of their regular service they were also providing meals at the emergency shelter at Pete Palangio arena until the facility closed.

“We had staff doing 40 and 50 hour weeks in here, we took on extra meals, whenever there was a challenge we tried to accept the challenge. We were doing 90 meals a day for the Palangio Arena as well as our regular meals,” he says.

Chippa says they won’t have to provide meals for the new shelter location but they’re still busy.

He says they believe a lot of clients were getting the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.

“Some of that isn’t there any more. A lot of the money that may have been coming in for them, and they’ve been kind of getting used to it, and now the money is not there. We know the numbers are there, there’s a lot more people that we’ve been seeing, families and a few more people that we haven’t seen before,” Chippa tells BayToday.

He also says some of their programming has changed.

“We’re doing some work in Ferris, we’re expanding our outreach program. Our food outreach program is now going to a couple different apartment buildings in the city to deliver cooked food,” Chippa says. “We know there’s still a lot of people in isolation, they’re a vulnerable group.”

The Gathering Place is holding an online art auction in support of expanding the food outreach program to Ferris.

CLICK HERE for the link

The auction closes August 23rd.

 

File photo by Linda Holmes/BayToday.ca

Filed under: north bay, The Gathering Place Soup Kitchen