North Bay soup kitchen to keep doors open, but cuts staff and meals

Board members and executives with The Gathering Place in North Bay are keeping its doors open, but is significantly reducing meal services.

A meeting was held Tuesday night where two options were presented: close for good or reduce the number of meals the soup kitchen can provide each day.

Board members and executives with The Gathering Place in North Bay are keeping its doors open, but are significantly reducing meal services.

The board said what little money the Cassells Street outreach service has is quickly draining.

“I’m just gutted. I have nothing left,” said Dennis Chippa, The Gathering Place’s executive director.

“I said that to someone else. I have nothing left. It’s been a year like this.”

The financial troubles are due to a few factors: donations have dried up, the increased cost of food, the amount of people facing food insecurity coming in for meals and tax issues.

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A meeting was held Wednesday morning where a handful of staff members received temporary layoff notices.

“The hardship here is we have to pay wages. So we have to cut down on the number of hours and to reduce the wages,” said Peter Gregory, the soup kitchen’s new board chair.

Each day, 300 meals are served at the facility. Seventy per cent of clients are not homeless.

Chippa said these are people just above the poverty line who need meals each day to get by.

Lunch service only

The board chose to keep the non-profit organization’s doors open but reduce meals to lunch only.

“People are forgetting that as costs go up, they talk about our costs,” Chippa said.

“The reason we have such a high demand is … costs have gone up for everyone else.”

For months, the soup kitchen’s budget has been bleeding. In April, The Gathering Place cuts to its to-go meals. It also paused its food outreach program to save money.

Chippa said figures show that it costs just more than $40,000 a month to run the facility.

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Client Todd Doucette fears that without the service running three times each week day, even more people will go hungry.

“We really depend on this for meals,” he told CTV News. “We’ve got nowhere else to go.”

A major misstep was not paying remittance to Revenue Canada. The Gathering Place has since fixed that problem by refinancing their building.

“CRA has been cleared up now and that’s why we’re in a precarious decision,” Gregory said.