Statement of Reconciliation
Food Banks Canada’s Statement of Reconciliation reflects our mission to relieve hunger today and prevent hunger tomorrow. In part because of past and present injustices, we know hunger doesn’t affect everyone in Canada equally. Northern communities often face crisis-level hunger, magnified by geography and high living costs. And in Canada as a whole, Indigenous families are more likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to experience food insecurity.
We understand that this unfortunate reality is part of the legacy of colonialism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s final report details how hunger was commonplace in the residential school system and how it has been a recurring effect of the broader history between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
Food Banks Canada is committed to working with Indigenous communities throughout the country to improve food access and food sovereignty.
We must work to build trusting relationships and to foster and support community-led solutions — when that support is desired — and to walk with people with lived experience of food insecurity, reflecting their voices in our strategies and activities so that no one is left out of the progress toward ending hunger.
As part of our current strategic plan, we are:
- Dedicating funding to support Indigenous communities in identifying, testing, and implementing food security and sovereignty projects and distribution methods in the North, emphasizing local leadership and sustainable solutions.
- Convening regular dialogue among a formalized and expanding group of stakeholders involved in Northern food insecurity — including communities, governments, food banks, schools, and organizations — to promote and advance Indigenous food sovereignty, sustainable food security, and access.
- Continuing to ensure that the North is prioritized in our research, policy, and advocacy work, addressing cross-cutting issues informed by community needs and intersecting with government priorities. This work will include a focus on elevating the role of people with lived experience of food insecurity through a set of intentional approaches, including establishing a community advisory committee, to help advance Food Banks Canada’s work.
- Defining an organization-wide approach to reconciliation through the engagement of an Indigenous-led consulting firm, and using these learnings to gather and share best practices throughout the food bank network.
- Providing education for our team on the history of Indigenous peoples, the legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law and Aboriginal-Crown relations, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports and its 94 calls to action.
Guided by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that “Indigenous peoples have the right to be actively involved in developing and determining health, housing, and other economic and social programs affecting them and, as far as possible, to administer such programs through their own institutions,” we approach our work with the following principles:
By invitation: We will work to build relationships, and when Indigenous communities welcome our involvement, we will collaborate to identify and address specific local needs.
Community-led and sustainable solutions: We will work with communities and the food bank network to identify, test, and implement food security and sovereignty projects and distribution methods, emphasizing local leadership and sustainable solutions.
Equal right to access: We believe in Article 24 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms that “Indigenous individuals have an equal right to access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services.”
Food Banks Canada continues to learn and grow. Our ambition for this statement is that it will guide us in cultivating respectful, beneficial partnerships that will help unlock potential throughout Canada and bring everyone closer to a Canada where no one goes hungry.
Land Acknowledgement
As an organization that supports a network of associations spanning coast-to-coast-to-coast, Food Banks Canada recognizes that our work takes place on the traditional territories of Indigenous Peoples who have cared for this land that we now call Canada since time immemorial.
We acknowledge that many of us are settlers and that these lands that we live, work, meet, and travel on are subject to First Nations self-government under modern treaty, unceded and un-surrendered territories, or traditional territories from which First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Peoples have been displaced.
We are committed to decolonization and to dismantling the systems of oppression that have dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands, including the land on which we operate, denied their rights to self-determination.
