“Food is not a patient thing, it’s urgent”: how data collection and sharing can help people in Calgary access emergency food

Food banks alone are no longer able to keep up with the growing demand for emergency food in Calgary.  (Image: Vibrant Communities Calgary)

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Before Covid, there were 65 emergency charity food providers in the city of Calgary. 

Seemingly overnight, the number shot up to a couple of hundred, says Meaghon Reid, the executive director of Vibrant Communities Calgary, an organization that aims to eradicate poverty in the city. And despite emergency Covid funding grinding to a halt, demand for the food that these organizations provide is still growing. 

“Moving into a recession is having a significant impact on people’s finances,” Reid says. “Food is generally the first thing people will negotiate on, as shelter is the thing you need to hold on to.” 

According to Reid, food bank usage in the city of Calgary has increased 80 per cent since this time last year, but food banks alone are no longer able to meet the growing need for emergency food. Meanwhile, the landscape of emergency food providers – from community fridges to faith-based groups – do have food to give out on any given day. 

Accessing timely information about where exactly those food providers are and what they have available, however, is not a simple task. “Some don’t even have a web presence, while others operate on Instagram,” Reid says. For those in distress, being able to find this information quickly and easily is critical. 

This ongoing and growing food insecurity is the challenge that has led Vibrant Communities Calgary to partner with Technology Helps. The goal is to build a system that allows people in need of food to connect with and search for local food providers, as well as addressing the lack of coordination between these providers themselves, says Charles Buchanan, founder and CEO of Technology Helps. 

While the exact scope of the technical solution has yet to be determined, it’ll remain relatively uncomplicated, says Buchanan. The key, however, will be real-time data that people in need of emergency food can access at a local level. One of the first steps for the team is to amalgamate data from the organizations that provide emergency food resources. 

The data will include the locations of emergency food providers around the city, the inventory each provider holds at any given time, and in some cases, when there has been a recent delivery of fresh food that local people can access. The first iteration of the system is due to launch between early and mid-2023, and will aim to get anybody in Calgary who needs a source of food connected with one within 24 hours.

How are emergency food providers being incentivized to collaborate and share data?

The challenge will be keeping the data relevant and real-time, which will require the emergency food providers themselves to consistently update what they have in stock. 

So, a system of this sort can’t work without buy-in from food providers, be that a church that puts together food hampers once a week, or a school that has been collecting food supplies. 

Vibrant Communities Calgary is regularly in touch with a number of emergency food providers working on the ground, and Reid doesn’t doubt that those running emergency food services want to make sure the stock goes to the people who need it most. However, there are still some mental barriers that may stop organizations from fully engaging with the system itself, Reid warns. These barriers are all the more heightened when each food organization needs to commit to embracing a new process, like data collection, validation and sharing. 

Some emergency food providers prefer to stick to paper-based, blackboard or spreadsheet systems to keep their inventory up to date. The day-to-day nature of their work, as well as the fact that they’re often led by volunteers, doesn’t leave much time or dedicated resources to set up digital tools or communication. For them, using a system that requires them to input and constantly update data about their incoming and outcoming inventory might require a lot of learning, Reid says.

There is also a general lack of standardization and coordination between emergency food providers working on the ground, Reid and Buchanan say. “We would be naive to think that this [system] wouldn’t surface competitions in the sector,” Reid adds. 

“We have to start from a base assumption that people are busy, and that we can’t expect them to remember to update [food inventory] information,” Reid says. “If we rely solely on volunteers, it’s not going to work.”

 “It’s not the technology itself that fails, it’s when we fail to put the human resources behind it,” she adds. That is why Reid is currently in the process of applying for funding for a specific coordinator role, a position which will eventually become the responsibility of one of the local food organizations in Calgary. 

The role of this person will be to actively manage and validate the data in the system, Buchanan adds, understanding that if it is being inputted by food organizations and volunteers themselves, it might not always be clean and up-to-date. Embedding this role into a food organization could help the sector increase coordination, as well as sharing knowledge and best practices on data-sharing between them. 

Why data itself isn’t the solution, but a way to reveal the scale of the problem

When people are seeking emergency food resources, there’s an emotional component to keep in mind. “[Finding] food is not a patient thing. It’s urgent,” Reid says. Some might be likely to call an emergency or distress service such as 211. Buchanan sees these distress services as also having access to the back-end of this information system on the city’s emergency food landscape. 

“The 211 operator should be able to readily say to that individual what their possibilities [for finding food] are, and the means by which they are accessible to them,” he says. “For instance, they could point out where an emergency food provider is, and how the person can walk or take the bus there.” 

This service will always need to be accessible through a simple phone call, or even in an analogue, physical location, Buchanan adds. This ensures that those who don’t have access to, or don’t know how to use, a smart device aren’t left out if they aren’t able to conduct an internet search for emergency food. It’s what Reid calls “hardware and experience poverty” – a challenge which often heavily intersects with food insecurity as well. 

“We don’t need fancy design or technology. We just need a usable workhorse,” Reid says. “Slick technology can feel a little inaccessible and academic [to people].” The technical complexity and data has to exist in the back-end, far away from the end-users themselves. 

There is potential for this Calgary-based solution to be replicated elsewhere in Canada and even internationally, Buchanan says. The problem of people needing food is one that exists in almost every city, but that needs local solutions from organizations on the ground. “The technology is not complicated, but scaling does get expensive over time,” he adds. 

This is likely because although the system can be simple to start with, it can get complicated once more data from different food providers is added to it over time. In the long run, as the system expands out to other cities, more dedicated resources might need to be hired to manage it on a local level.

For Reid, it’s also vital to communicate to food providers that just coordinating and gathering data on the problem of food insecurity and poverty doesn’t solve the problem. “The end goal is not better coordination of the problem — it’s alleviation and system change,” she says. 

Food insecurity has fallen by the wayside from a policy perspective, but “data can help a lot in [driving] system change,” she adds. “This [project] would gather data, and data really influences government policy.”

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