Fresh
Food
Weekly
Timeline
Here is a timeline of the significant milestones achieved and challenges faced by Fresh Food Weekly since its very first charitable activity was conducted in December, 2020.
January 2021
Fresh Food Weekly received a charitable trust account number from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
December 2021
Since Fresh Food Weekly had been doing weekly deliveries of produce and bread items during the summer of 2021, Lisa Peterson of Stone Horse Farm and Manager of the Thornton Farmers' Market, reached out and said she was doing a Christmas fundraiser to raise money for 50 Christmas meal boxes and asked if Fresh Food Weekly would be able to deliver them to low-income families in Barrie. This is how the meal box program was birthed.
August 2023
Donations had nearly stopped coming in and we had to temporarily halt biweekly meal box deliveries (since we didn’t have enough funds). This is when we launched the ‘Healthy Cooking Workshops for Kids’, which were taught by Leah Dyck’s mom, Mary Dyck, as she’s a Paediatric Nurse at The Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital’s ‘Choosing Healthy Actions Together (CHAT) Clinic.
November 2023 to January 2024
When the Fresh Food Weekly program was first designed back in 2021, one of the things we didn’t anticipate was the large number of recipients who didn’t know how to cook, or who haven’t tried awesome, classic North American dishes such as Chicken Parmesan. This is when we decided to alter the program design, and start offering ‘Meal Box Meal Kits’. Our biweekly meal boxes continued to provide staple items such as milk, eggs, butter, cheese, meat, produce, and toilet paper, but also included recipe cards, all the ingredients needed to make the recipe (exact portions), as well as step-by-step, “heavily- pictured” printed cooking directions.
