Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for providing us with this opportunity to share a bit of what's happening for us. We're an example of the potential that can be replicated across the country from investing in a club or organization like ours.

This is a very historic moment for BGC East Scarborough. I'll share a bit about who we are and what we do.

BGC East Scarborough is a children and youth organization that focuses on supporting children and youth with their development needs from cradle to career. One of the essential, key programs embedded in our fabric is our food program. We provide snack student nutrition programs and morning and breakfast programs, and we cater all of our daytime meal programs for licensed child care and EarlyON services. For our youth programs, we are mandated to have food as a part of every program we offer to the broader community, and we're serving over 6,500 children and youth monthly. We also service the community with community food programs for those who are vulnerable, isolated and in need.

For us, food is definitely a central point of how we show up to the table in servicing the community. With this historic moment in Canada and this investment, we'll join other G7 countries and industrialized countries around the world in establishing a national food program.

We've been part of the Coalition for Healthy School Food for many years now. As a collaborative, we've been working diligently on sharing our data and the impacts of these supports with the broader collective, which has representation across Canada.

This investment is an excellent social and economic policy that will support children and youth in schools across the country to be well nourished and ready to learn and to have equal opportunity to succeed. It will also help families by reducing grocery bills and will support women, parents, farmers, food systems, jobs, economic growth and communities across the country.

We sent in data from the World Food Programme meeting earlier this year in Paris, and it said, “All the evidence shows that school meals programmes, along with other social protection initiatives, are one of the smartest long-term investments any government can make.” We see that long term. We follow children from, as I said, cradle all the way to career. We see first-hand the impacts of not only providing food but also providing access to nutrient-dense, quality food and food literacy as part of the ongoing journey.

In Ontario today, a major announcement was made about financial literacy in schools. We strongly believe that through student nutrition programming, food literacy in schools will help us curb a lot of the social determinant impacts or negative impacts on the long-term lives of children and youth across the country. We see it first-hand in east Scarborough.

BGC East Scarborough looks forward to working in collaboration with all levels of government. We are currently provincially funded, but we receive just under $10,000 to serve a large number of children and youth each year. That works out to about 25¢ per snack and $1.10 per meal. You can see how, for us as a non-profit charitable organization, this layered-on investment will help us shore up these programs and have a sustainable way of providing them.

Right now, we are dependent on other revenue sources, and with the economy and all of what we're facing from the global economic impacts coming out of COVID and from the transition through a time of austerity, we are so excited for and very much in support of student nutrition collaboration across the country to layer on supports for clubs like ours and for schools and community spaces that are providing alternative meal programs. As part of the coalition, we definitely look forward to being consulted on and supporting this particular investment as it is being rolled out across the country.