A Message from The People's Pantry Cofounders
October 27, 2021

Starting November 1st, 2021, we will temporarily pause our Toronto-based cooked meal and grocery package program. During this time, we will be focusing on restructuring our operations in an intentional and dedicated effort to go back to our mutual aid roots and serve marginalized communities in Toronto in uplifting, reciprocal, dignified, and sustainable ways.

The People’s Pantry was originally founded impromptu in March 2020 after six low income/precarious workers, who are predominately women and Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC), started cooking and buying food and other essential resources for nearby communities across Toronto/The Greater Toronto area. As we did this work, community members who had received meals and care packages began volunteering their time, skills and expertise to our collective. Our goal was to get food, groceries, and connection to hard-hit communities following the first COVID-19 lockdown and the corresponding rise in fear-mongering, grocery store overcrowding and violence, mass income loss, and rapid food insecurity. We specifically prioritized the communities that were not only most impacted by COVID, but the least cared for and most neglected/exploited by the state and typical non-profit food initiatives: QTBIPOC, single mothers, sex workers, the elderly, the precariously housed, migrant workers, and the disabled.

While we are so grateful that our mutual aid project has garnered so much additional support over nearly 2 years, reaching more than 30,000 food insecure families in Southern Ontario and working with more than 500 volunteers, we never intended to be such a wide-scale initiative. We intended to do mutual aid and to be people showing up for our people – to be, in every essence of the phrase, a community-based food justice project. However, emerging literally at the exact same time COVID-19 hit Ontario, an unprecedented global crisis with diversely devastating effects meant that the conditions under which TPP has operated have changed rapidly over time. For instance, who can volunteer with us has changed after the very communities who made up the heart of TPP were forced to continue working through various lockdowns, others returned to work and were increasingly replaced with, although well-meaning, still disconnected, monied white folx with the resources and time to volunteer. Second, the ability to address food insecurity in Toronto became harder as everyone went back to work. Many got vaccinated, and the whitestream started to push the idea that “COVID is over” at the exact same time, food insecurity in the city was at an all-time high. Corresponding with such changes is that we, as co-founders, had never set out to form a food justice group but rather, through our actions, wanted to show up in socially just ways for our people. Through a massive scaling up, a shift in our internal make-up and an increasing push to streamline and digitize requests, our initial principles of unity were undermined.

In particular, over the last few months, we feel that TPP has shifted from a by and for QT/BIPOC mutual aid group to a non-profit model of charity run by white professionals with white professional politics. We believe this has shifted us away from solidarity and closer to the very elitist and racist charity models we initially set out to challenge. This shift was not intentional nor the fault of any one person. Instead, the shift happened organically as the conditions that made TPP possible dissolved/changed, community members and cofounders burnt out, and, because of our impromptu emergence, we misguidedly continued to try to take on the entirety of food insecurity in Toronto – an impossible task for any mutual aid group.

Nevertheless, these politics do not reflect the politics and practices of a mutual aid group. They have caused harm to people in our communities by adopting streamlined and impersonal mechanisms that resemble nonprofits and charities, such as our recent lottery system for Toronto groceries and our highly bureaucratic and technical ways of communicating with Toronto requesters. We adopted these tactics in an unchecked effort “to serve more people'' that ultimately compromised our ethics and commitment to mutual aid. We sincerely apologize for making these mistakes and how these transitions impacted communities relying on us for meals and groceries.

As the loose collective who started this initiative in March of 2020, we feel it’s our responsibility to call for a full pause to our Toronto operations while our sister initiative continues to serve the community in/near the GTA. We will fulfil all requests made up to this point. We will spend the next little while working to fix the mistakes we’ve made to make sure our commitment to food justice stays intact and that the people we set out to get food, joy, and community to during a global pandemic conditioned by white supremacy, racial capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, are uplifted, not harmed, by the work we do.

In solidarity,
Andrea Román Alfaro
Ellie Ade Kur
Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa
Michelle Huang
Paul Pritchard
Yann Gracia