Orton Community Association

Sharing Recipient Stories

2021 Dufferin County Food for Thought Grant Recipient
$1,000

Sharing our grant story

The Orton Community Association received a $1000 Food for Thought grant for the 2021 year. Due to COVID pandemic restrictions, we were unable to begin our project until April of 2022.

We began by recruiting interested community members to plan menus and talk about nutrition and eating healthy on a budget. We were fortunate enough to have a nutritionist who donated their time and expertise to guide our menu planning. Our first dinner club had 30 people in attendance who enjoyed a meal together. Our second dinner had 50 people in attendance, and the subsequent three dinners for the year yielded about 70 people.

Living in a rural community, the sense of isolation can be problematic. Add to this a pandemic which created circumstances that further added to this isolation. Our secondary goal for these dinners was to reintroduce neighbours to neighbours. We wanted to begin to re-establish the sense of community that had been diminishing because of the lack of social events that could occur.

At the last dinner of that occurred, community members said they loved coming to the dinners as they feel such a sense of connection to the people in their neighbourhoods now. They said in previous places they lived, people would not talk to each other. Now, they feel they know people and if they need help, they know who to ask. Specifically, at our first dinner, we had two families who lived on the same line but had never met. These families in turn began inviting more neighbours to come out to the dinners and now we have six families represented from one rural street.