Thank you to all those who donated for Round 2: London! We were thrilled to have surpassed the funds raised from Round 1, raising a total of $2,041.40 in one week. Your donations will be used to purchase food boxes containing fresh, locally-sourced produce for at-risk populations in London.
Our team is still working diligently on our other projects, including Project Hamilton and Project Laos, which you can take a look at on our website. We’ll be introducing the projects one by one over the next few months. These projects are what we at Operation Poverty initially set as our goals for impact and have been developing over the past year, and we’re very excited to share them soon.
We will also be putting together an annual impact report at the end of the year that highlights all the projects and initiatives we’ve worked on. We will be including a donor list in the report—if you donated for either of our fundraising rounds and would like to remain anonymous, please indicate that preference by sending us a message at contact@operationpoverty.org.
Round 2 Recap
We partnered with the HBA Association at Western University for this round of fundraising, who agreed to match every dollar donated up to $1,000. Thanks to you, we were able to fully maximize this opportunity.
To ensure that our fundraiser was going towards a cause that was truly in need, we first researched and reached out to various organizations across the London, Ontario area. During our outreach, we discovered that many smaller, community-based food programs serving at-risk populations did not receive any assistance from the government or foundational grants. It is for this reason that we decided to focus on these smaller food programs.
Our story was also featured in the Western Gazette, where we were able to share our COVID-19 response and other projects we’re working on. You can check it out below:
The Food Program: Life Spin’s Community Food Boxes
“We initiated the program because we serve an extremely vulnerable population and felt it was critical to have food delivered directly to their homes. Because of their very low fixed incomes, most do not have credit cards to order from mainstream delivery services and when we launched the program, all other urgent food measures still required them to be picked-up. This initiative also supports workers and local food businesses, which will help our community recover from the pandemic at the end of the day.”
Quote by Jacquie Thompson, Executive Director at Life Spin
Life Spin is located in the East London Ontario community and is dedicated to supporting individuals surviving on low incomes. We connected with Jacquie Thompson, executive director at Life Spin, to learn about what they do and why they started the community food box program. Their other programs include the housing initiative, the free store, backpack program, and other community services to empower at-risk populations.
Our Trip to Life Spin on Victoria Day
We made the trip to Life Spin on Victoria Day, where we were able to visit their office and meet some of the team. We also took several hours during Victoria Day last week to deliver the food boxes to homes, apartments, and townhouses all over London.
Throughout the course of our fundraising rounds, we met many people including organization directors, volunteers, and at-risk populations, all from different backgrounds and cultures. As we worked with them to support their programs, we were encouraged by the gratitude expressed by everyone we interacted with. We all recognized that these were unprecedented times, but bonded together over the common cause of helping each other and those in need, especially during times of crisis.
Operation Poverty 