Debbie Marson believes in these times people need to exercise patience and kindness.
"We need to look out for each other and our community does that for us at the Food Bank - we do feel we do have community support," said Marson, the executive director of the North Bay Food Bank.
"However, things are going to change but the more people just think of themselves, it does really limit the donations that will come in or our ability to be able to purchase the things we need. Just remember, we do not need to hoard, we just all have to make sure we are all being fed."
Marson realizes hoarding food and products like toilet paper due to the COVID-19 scare have been well documented in recent days. She believes there is still a lot of goodwill in this community.
"We still feel we have a good complement of people donating," said Marson late Monday afternoon.
"Not so much with the non-perishables but they are stepping up with monetary which does help."
As of now, the Food Bank remains running with its regular hours but they will be limiting it to five people in the Food Bank at one time.
"We are remaining calm, we are taking it day-by-day knowing that we have clients that look to us for support and look to our support through the community so without the community we cannot do the servicing that we do right," she said.
"The community is awesome when it comes to the Food Rescue partnerships that we have, with the donations and the money coming through. The clients, I think are in a good frame of mind so Monday would have been the first day since a lot of this went down over the weekend and we have just modified the way we are doing things like the rest of North Bay is. We are very cognisant of cleanliness and sanitization, hand washing, using hand sanitizer, keeping the social distance, we are limiting to five people in at a time and we are bagging our hampers whereas before they were in a container and our clients would unpack them into their own bags so now we are pre-packaging so that they can easily just take them from the counter into their own packaging and be on their way."
Marson says the easiest way to help out is to donate online through the North Bay Food Bank website HERE
