GK Foundation: Connecting with students through food bank

Access to tertiary education is a struggle for most Jamaicans due to the high cost involved, so it comes as little or no surprise that hunger is a real challenge for many college students with limited financial resources.

Caroline Mahfood, chief executive officer of the GraceKennedy (GK) Foundation, says the GK Campus Connect Food Bank began in 2019 after the charity realised that many of its tertiary scholarship recipients were being affected by hunger because they could not buy food even after receiving assistance with tuition.

“Our education programme has always been focused on (giving) scholarships for university students, but what we realised is that even with the support we have been giving these students, many were facing hunger,” she said.

“It is heartbreaking to hear students say things like, ‘my family used to share one tin of mackerel for a week’. I had the head of the financial aid office at UTech say she knew of a student who was relying on cough syrup to keep them going because they need a little sugar,” Mahfood shared.

Just over 100 students from The University of the West Indies, University of Technology and the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts get food packages on a monthly basis from the GK Campus Connect Food Bank. Included in the packages are non-perishable items like rice, oatmeal, tinned beans and vegetables, corned beef, mackerel, sardine, sausage, among other things. The GraceKennedy Foundation is now looking at the possibility of including fresh agricultural produce in the packages starting in September, Mahfood says.

And Mahfood says notwithstanding the disruption to face-to-face classes by the ongoing pandemic, the foundation has continued the distribution of food packages to beneficiary students across the island in their respective communities.

Food Bank

Though the charity would like to expand the reach to more tertiary-level students, Mahfood says the operation of the GK Campus Connect Food Bank is an expensive undertaking that costs $1 million per month, and so has to be carefully managed to ensure sustainability. However, she says GraceKennedy being the largest food manufacturer in the Caribbean is committed to continuing the initiative because “it has been really life-changing for them (beneficiaries)”.

With environmental protection being another area of focus, the charity’s CEO says it has partnered with the international group The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit engineering environmental organisation based in the Netherlands, to tackle pollution in the Kingston Harbour. She says The Ocean Cleanup will use the Kingston Harbour clean-up as a pilot, the outcome of which it will use as a benchmark for similar initiatives in other parts of the world.

“We believe the Kingston Harbour is a pot of gold. There is a lot of potential for shipping, fishing, recreation, (and) there is a project by the Government for a harbour walk. We want people to come downtown and enjoy the harbour but right now that’s not possible with the stench and the pollution that’s coming from upstream through the gullies into the harbour,” Mahfood emphasised.

The pilot project, which is being funded by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, will be done in two phases, the first of which is expected to get under way in September with three of the 11 gullies that empty into the harbour. After a six-month assessment, the remaining eight gullies will be included.

The GraceKennedy Foundation CEO explains that The Ocean Cleanup will be installing heavy-duty traps at the mouth of these gullies to collect waste and other debris that make their way into the harbour.

“This is the first time they are doing anything like this in the world … they will be bringing in state-of-the-art equipment, put up barriers at all of these gullies and they will have a piece of equipment that will have a conveyor belt (to) pick up the waste that have been trapped by the barriers. They then take it to an off-loading site, sort it and the plastics can go to Recycle Partners of Jamaica and the garbage to the Riverton City dump,” Mahfood said in explaining the scope of the pilot.

She says it is imperative for the pilot to be successful as it would encourage more corporate support and funding for a wide-scale clean-up of the entire harbour, especially the restoration of mangroves which are being stifled by plastics.