At Daily Bread Food Bank, we’re lucky to have no shortage of women leaders. Our founder was a woman and over half of our leadership and board are women.
And that’s just the starting point. For International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting just a few of the remarkable women fighting to end hunger in our city.
Daily Bread’s member agency Sistering is a rare 24/7 drop-in centre providing support specifically to women and gender-diverse people. Their kitchen serves about 300 meals a day — curry chicken, pork chops, steaming winter soups — and gives clients valuable work experience and cooking skills through an employment program. Standing at the kitchen’s helm is Maureen Watson.
Maureen Watson, Food Access Supervisor
at Sistering, a Daily Bread member agency
Maureen first started cooking at Sistering nearly 17 years ago. In her current supervisory role, she is no longer making meals regularly, but she still tries to don the hairnet and get behind the stove whenever she can. Recently, to commemorate Bob Marley’s birthday, she whipped up Jamaican escovitch fish, one of the many dishes that her team created to celebrate Black History Month.
Nourishing Sistering’s community brings Maureen so much meaning. “It always touches me to be able to give back through my food,” she said. “Food is a mainstay. If you don’t have food, you can’t live, you can’t survive.”
In 2024, Daily Bread Food Bank distributed a staggering 41.1 million pounds of food to our network of 205 programs across Toronto. And practically every single pallet and pound was protected in some way by the work of Lara Conceicao, Daily Bread’s Quality Assurance Manager.
Lara Conceicao, Quality Assurance Manager
at Daily Bread Food Bank
As a food safety specialist with a background in the sciences, Lara manages our sanitation, waste management and pest control programs, as well as the activity in our production hall, where our food gets prepped for distribution.
She makes sure food moves through our 108,000-square-foot facility in the safest and most efficient way possible. She knows off-hand which vegetables will ripen fastest and how to store our produce to best preserve freshness. She led the effort to restructure the order we sort our donations, ensuring that unsorted food doesn’t sit in our warehouse too long. Because of her, our team now gets auto-notifications if our cooler or freezer temp exceeds a certain range, and more high-quality food goes out to the more than 1 in 10 Torontonians relying on food banks to feed themselves and their families.
The fact that the work she does on any given day directly affects thousands of people makes Lara’s role deeply impactful. “I feel very fulfilled by the job that I do,” Lara said. “I think it’s meaningful. I have never been as happy in any other job.”
Augustina Michael wakes up at 5:00am almost every weekday. She leaves her Scarborough home by 5:45am, travelling an hour and 45 minutes by TTC to open up Daily Bread Food Bank’s Welcome Centre before other volunteers start to arrive.
Why? “I just love it here,” she said. “Back in my home country [of Nigeria], you hardly get one person, let alone hundreds, giving food for free, so seeing they need help giving it out? I’m always willing to do that.”
Augustina Michael, Daily Bread Food Bank volunteer
She started volunteering at Daily Bread in May 2024, and has come almost every workday since, in total giving an incredible 1,081 hours to the fight to end hunger (as of early March – the number is always growing!). She’s consistently among the five volunteers who have donated the most time to Daily Bread’s cause.
Part of the reason she keeps coming back is the clients. She remembers one woman who came one winter evening after our on-site food bank had already closed. Augustina and a friend were about to go to dinner, but they stayed back to find an emergency hamper of food to give to her. “She was happy that she didn’t have to go back with nothing,” Augustina said. “She kept on repeating ‘thank you!’” Augustina could feel her relief. “What if she goes back and she has nothing to eat at home?”
It all started with a few food drives in 2019. Carolina Lorenz, Director of Marketing at NEXT Plumbing & Hydronics Supply, picked up some yellow bins from Daily Bread Food Bank and placed them in each of the company’s then-11 locations.
Today, our team says there are few areas of the organization that NEXT hasn’t supported. Through Carolina’s coordination, NEXT has become a formidable partner in the fight to end hunger.
Carolina Lorenz, Director of Marketing at
NEXT Plumbing & Hydronics Supply, accepting
a Daily Bread Food Bank Best in Class award
After seeing interest from those initial food drives, Carolina reached out to Daily Bread to schedule a corporate volunteer shift. Employee response was so positive that they’ve since volunteered a half-dozen more times and have three more dates scheduled for 2025.
During these shifts, Carolina got to know more about Daily Bread’s operation and our greatest needs. One day she was struck by an idea: NEXT is a wholesaler with many trucks on the road in the GTA, delivering products to customers – what if on their way back, the trucks transported food for Daily Bread? She reached out to our operations managers and offered to help. Since then, NEXT trucks have provided crucial transportation assistance during our busiest times.
“The culture at NEXT is all about giving back to the community,” said Carolina. “We take giving back very seriously; our Core Values are about being integral to our customers, coworker and community.”
Read more about NEXT’s support here.
In 2022, one of Boafoa Kwamena’s close friends decided to reopen Daily Bread member agency Grace Pascoe Food Bank, which had closed due to the pandemic. Boafoa started volunteering to support her friend, but what she witnessed there kept her coming back for two and a half years.
“You see the lineup and you see actual members of your own community,” she said. “Your children are in the same child-care program, they play at the same park; these are your neighbours…I felt a strong responsibility to help my own neighbours.”
Boafoa Kwamena, member of the
Daily Bread Food Bank board of directors
Grace Pascoe reopened amid an absolute explosion in Toronto food bank use. Boafoa saw the hunger crisis rising around her. “I became increasingly outraged as our lines grew and the demand for our services grew,” she said. “I just felt like I needed to do more to help bring light to the issue, and I can’t do that from the sidelines.”
That’s why she applied to join Daily Bread’s board of directors, tackling the fight to end hunger in a new way. “Food is a human right,” Boafoa said. “The fact that there are people that live next to me that need to line up, that miss meals, sending their kids to school without a full meal — it is completely unacceptable.”
