It all started with a groundbreaking Twitter thread that Paul Taylor, the executive director for FoodShare Toronto, posted last week on his personal account:
Our community responded on Twitter, with many Toronto residents echoing that this showed real leadership and that they hoped to see this become a standard hiring practice for organizations.
Taylor understands the realities of preparing for an interview: the time and money lost from potentially needing to leave work, the dwindling potential savings, the child-care, transportation and labour involved.
“It’s so important. It’s labour that employers have been expecting people to do for free for far too long. It’s bizarre and outrageous that we’ve all collectively allowed this to happen,” Taylor said.
FoodShare believes the responsibility falls on the employer to step up and recognize that there is labour before, and during the interview, that needs to be recognized and fairly compensated.
“If someone gets an interview that pays them, that can make a huge difference in making sure that they can eat that week.”
Paul Taylor
Taylor spoke of the work of non-profits and charities in the industrial complex, and how they are often focused on community, but that they may be missing opportunities to advance justice in the hiring process and ongoing employment.
“We don’t want to shame other businesses for not doing these things, but we want to lean into inspiring people to think about what’s possible. Paying for interviews has garnered a bit of attention, but this is just one of the many things that we do. We really work to centre justice and equity,” Taylor said.
Some of the ways FoodShare works to create justice and equity is by giving potential hires the questions for interviews 48 hours in advance. Foodshare believes that it’s not helpful to surprise or trick interviewees and provides time to process, digest and reflect on the questions being asked.
While Toronto’s living wage is set at $22.08, FoodShare asserts that no one makes less than $24 no matter what they do for the organization. With a ratio of 1:3 that connects the lowest paid worker to the highest-paid worker, this means the highest-paid person at FoodShare can only make three times what the lowest-paid person earns.
Along with an emergency loan program where workers can obtain $2000 for a non-interest loan — paid back at whatever rate the employee feels is fair — they offer 20 wellness days, 10 personal days, four weeks of paid vacation and a holiday shutdown for one to two weeks. These initiatives are intended to support mental and physical health for the FoodShare team.
“We feel that FoodShare has a responsibility to make sure we’re supporting healthy people and healthy communities,” Taylor said.
Growing up in Toronto just off Lansdowne, not far from FoodShare’s previous location on Dufferin and Bloor, Taylor credits being raised in a low-income household, by a single parent, as the most important experience of his life. He also believes there are key messages that children learn growing up in low-income families.
“What society tells us we deserve, is a lack of political attention and ambition, but also other people’s leftovers. Whether it’s leftover food or hand-me-down clothes, there are so many narratives around low-income people being akin to walking compost bins,” Taylor said.
Taylor remembers being 13 years old when Mike Harris was elected in 1995 as Ontario’s new premier. Shortly after Harris came to power, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario cut welfare benefits by 21.6 per cent. These cuts translated into real consequences for Taylor’s family: less food, and periods of time without heat, hot water or electricity.
“For me, it was an eye-opening moment. It was the first time I saw my mother cry and it was also the first time I started thinking about the systems, and the politicians that make decisions that affect our lives,” Taylor said.
“Pretty much from that moment on, I committed myself to doing everything I could to make sure that people and families don’t have to struggle the way that my family had been forced to struggle.”
Lived experience accounts for Taylor’s insight and empathy working as an executive director for a number of organizations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and West End. Taylor has also worked as a member of various community outreach organizations helping to create change for underrepresented communities in Canada.
“I was involved in a lot of organizing with low-income communities, and activism around income, social assistance and food access for folks for whom it’s often an afterthought,” Taylor said.
Ultimately that initial experience led Taylor to FoodShare, an organization that has existed since 1985, with the mandate of responding to food insecurity.
Since then, FoodShare has evolved and aims to centre food justice by collaborating with and listening to those most affected by poverty and food insecurity: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour and People with Disabilities.
FoodShare also works with communities that have been chronically underinvested in, to build community-led infrastructure. Their goal is to inspire long-term solutions and create a system where everyone has access to affordable, fresh and nutritious food.
FoodShare’s Good Food Box provides access to fresh produce through social enterprise, and their Good Food Markets increase access to high-quality, culturally appropriate, and affordable produce in neighbourhoods where it might not otherwise be available.
“Recognizing that it shouldn’t just be the palest and the richest environments that have access to farmers’ markets, we are turning underutilized public land into urban farms and gardens for community use and creating markets connected to those farms,” Taylor said.
Taylor is also seizing opportunities for public education around the issue of food insecurity and advocating for the kind of public policy interventions that FoodShare believes would have a meaningful impact.
“We are helping people understand the gravity of the situation. What are the real root causes of food insecurity and how does it differ from hunger?” Taylor said.
Five years ago when Taylor stepped into the leadership role at FoodShare, he was curious about people’s collective understanding of food insecurity. Taylor thinks conversations around food can be an entry point into other conversations around systemic issues and opportunities for advocacy.
“I’m excited about the opportunity to be introducing and further honing the conversations around income interventions needed to combat food insecurity, as well as helping people recognize how things like anti-Black racism and anti-Indigeneity interact with food insecurity,” Taylor said.
Taylor stressed that these issues of inequity have largely been missing in this country’s mainstream conversations around food insecurity — conversations that primarily have focused on aggregate data.
Now, due to the pandemic, issues around food have been in the spotlight more than they have been for a long time. According to Taylor, this attention can be worrisome, since food insecurity is the kind of term that can be misused, and perhaps abused, if not thoroughly understood and explained.
“Often people are using food insecurity in place of hunger, and the two couldn’t be more different. Hunger is something that occurs on the individual level, that may or may not be caused by food insecurity,” Taylor said.
Since food insecurity is not measured at the individual level, but at the household level, the conversations around it must take into account the Canadian Community Health Survey, according to Taylor. Through households that are responding, FoodShare has been able to get a sense of what food insecurity looks like per household intersectionally, to really understand the issue.
“Hunger allows people to think that the solution is food when we actually have more than enough food in this country to feed everyone.”
Paul Taylor
Taylor believes that the focus on hunger instead of food insecurity has caused many to miss the mark. Taylor urges people to look at those who experience food insecurity disproportionately for a better way to help understand the issues. The data shows that Black, Indigenous, immigrants, disabled people and single-parent households are all communities that are more likely to experience food insecurity.
“Historically, the conversation has been nothing more than a footnote sometimes in speeches about who is most likely to experience food insecurity. We haven’t begun our interventions based on an appreciation of the folks that are most affected,” Taylor said. “We need to make sure there are interventions to support those folks.”
FoodShare has partnered with PROOF, an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Toronto, and together they’ve investigated disaggregated data, looking at the interconnections between food insecurity and Black households.
PROOF found that Black households are 3.5 times more likely to be food insecure than white households and that 36 per cent of Black children live in food-insecure households versus the 12 per cent of their white counterparts. With 14.5 per cent of white renters being food insecure, that figure is almost equal to the percentage of Black homeowners that are food insecure.
Digging deeper, the data revealed that white people in Canada received more income on social assistance than Black people in Canada received.
“We had no idea how that would be, but we recognized that the Ontario Disability Support Program factored into that. We inferred that meant white folks are more likely to be approved for disability — which means they are getting more income from basic social assistance on welfare,” Taylor said.
Taylor believes strongly that this data clearly shows that food will never solve the issue of anti-Black racism that exists in public policies, institutions and systems in Canada. Further analysis that recognizes the impact of anti-Black racism and removes white universalism within the sector is greatly needed, according to Taylor.
“Black people are rarely surprised. We see and experience these types of inequity in everything, whether it’s policing, prisons, police brutality, poverty, food insecurity, housing, health outcomes, this is pretty consistent. I think it’s white folks who have held to this idea that racism doesn’t exist or racism exists as racist acts, you know the n-word, these sorts of things,” Taylor said.
“Folks have fully realized that it’s our systems, our policies and our institutions that actually hold and uphold white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and that is work that requires considerable effort to take down.”
Paul Taylor
You can support FoodShare by visiting their website, following them on social media @foodshareTO or supporting their petition and campaign around the Right To Food, directed at the city of Toronto.
“We are encouraging the city of Toronto to develop a new Food Charter. The current charter was developed 20 years ago, and we’ve learned so much more about food insecurity since then, including who is most affected,” Taylor said.
“We want to see a Food Charter that’s led and inspired by the lived experiences of those most affected by food insecurity.”
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