After 16 years of providing food services and training for residents of Kingston, the Loving Spoonful charity has announced they will be ceasing operations.
The not-for-profit food organization shared the news on their website on Wednesday, stating that the economic landscape has changed and is creating challenges for organizations like Loving Spoonful to survive.
Their focus now is on trying to work with other organizations in Kingston to preserve some of the programs that have come to be a part of the community.
“The current economic landscape has presented funding challenges for many charities across Canada, including Loving Spoonful,” the statement reads.
“After a great deal of careful consideration, the board of Loving Spoonful has come to the difficult decision to cease operations. Throughout this difficult process, we knew we had to ensure that as many of our valuable programs as possible would be preserved and nurtured.”
Loving Spoonful says there are formal negotiations with “like minded organizations” in Kingston to continue the legacy the organization has built, but they provided no details on which organizations they were in discussion with, nor what programs might be the top priorities to pass along.
Lisa Wittur, Chair of the Board for Loving Spoonful, says there’s been several months of challenges that have forced the organization to re-examine what are the best options for moving forward and allowing existing programs to continue to some extent.
She says the organization they’re now in talks with has a broader reach into the Kingston community and beyond, and there’s hope that programs could have more of an impact under a large organization.
“I know that we’ve helped a lot of people in different ways, but if we can help bring a dollar in and help even more people with that same dollar, that is better because the dollars are limited,” Wittur said.
“There’s a shift in priorities as happens all the time in our economies. And so we wanted to find a place where the programs could potentially be supported in a broader context where more people could be serviced.”
Wittur says those priorities have shifted more towards programs that offer immediate relief, with so many people in Kingston and communities throughout Canada struggling to make the decision of whether to pay their bills or put food on the table.
Loving Spoonful, she says, focused more closely on education and trying to provide people with food sovereignty – longer term projects that are not as highly prioritized with the immediate need being so great.
“A lot of our programming was more focused on longer term knowledge,” Wittur said.
“We were trying to teach people how to fish as opposed to just giving them the fish, and the problem is there’s just such a high demand for just getting fish to people right now… if we get integrated, some of these programs into a larger base of people… then we hope that we can still teach people how to fish while they’re getting the fish at the same time. There’s just not as many dollars available.”
Loving Spoonful’s charity information return published by the Government of Canada shows that the organization managed to maintain a small surplus from 2018 through 2022, which is the most recently posted data.
Wittur said, however, that in 2023 the organization experienced a loss, and 2024 is trending in that direction as well.
“All of the reserves that we had built up are being diminished,” Wittur said.
“That was what led us to having the conversations that we had within the community with researching across the country and seeing what’s happening… does it make sense to keep continuing on separately or should we be looking at a place where we could have some of our programming housed and allow it to continue on, because there are very unique programs that we’ve brought to the community that we really want to have continue on.”
Loving Spoonful has brought programs to Kingston including the pay what you can Community Harvest Markets, free local food stands, a gleaning program with local farms and grocery stores, and the Kingston Community Training Farm.
The charity has tried to place an emphasis on educating the community and trying to provide people with the means to access more food security and food independence.
Wittur says she and other members of the organization will look back proudly on the education and empowerment they’ve been able to bring to the Kingston area for 16 years.
“I think the educational resources that we’ve brought to people and the empowerment that we’ve given them with regards to their knowledge around food security, where food comes from, the joy and benefits of accessing fresh food,” Wittur said.
“I think we’ve done a lot for Kingston to have a bigger appreciation for that. And we hope that that is something that will continue to thrive in the community and that maybe the… Loving Spoonful part two will continue on in some way with this new organization to carry on that trend that we started 16 years ago under the steps and Memorial Market.”
The organization intends to wind down by March 31, 2025.