A New School Year Begins!

For the Club, the back-to-school season is an important time of year. After a summer dedicated to developing new food distribution routes and updating the documentation on our breakfast programs, fall is when it all comes together.

A total of 243,521 Canadian children will soon be welcomed with open arms by kind-hearted volunteers in 1,809 breakfast programs across the country.

“Every Club employee is working hard to ensure that our kids can eat a healthy breakfast each and every morning. Even though we work at this all year round, the lead-up to September is always a little frantic. It’s quite a rush, getting everything in place for the volunteers to greet the kids they’ll be nurturing all year along. We wish everyone a wonderful first day back and year full of achievements, big and small!” – Marie-Josée Lapratte

The support the Club provides can vary depending on the school context. Through food deliveries, financial support, training and/or knowledge sharing, the Club strives to provide each school with the tools it needs to make sure participants get the most out of their breakfast program.

All breakfast programs receive a similar level of support as they prepare to reopen. We get in touch with the coordinators to ensure they have everything they need: hand-washing posters, food allergy factsheets, registration forms and more. Obviously, we will be paying special attention to the 166 programs that are new this year. It’s also the time for updates, including new guidelines for menu planning in light of the latest changes to Canada’s Food Guide in January 2019.

Over the summer, food partnerships are renegotiated to accommodate the breakfast programs and participants that have recently joined the BCC family. It’s around this time of year that we start accepting food donations for Quebec again at our distribution centre in Boucherville. Every week, some 100,000 pounds of food is shipped out from our warehouse. We also coordinate distribution chains in a number of Canadian cities to help make fresh and nutritious food available in more isolated communities, such as La Loche, Saskatchewan.

In other words, our entire network is abuzz with activity and working together to ensure that the start of the school year is a successful one.

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