INUVIK - The Inuvik Food Bank swooped in and donated $5,000 to the homeless shelter last week to keep the shelter's soup kitchen program from closing.

Bob Mumford hands over a cheque for $5,000 from the Inuvik Food Bank to Kathleen Selkirk of the homeless shelter. The money will help continue the shelter's soup kitchen. - Kira Curtis/NNSL photo

The program began last November with a grant from the GNWT, but funding began to dwindle and the shelter was preparing to stop serving its daily breakfast and dinner to those in town who need it.

Trying to extend the life of the kitchen, the shelter's Kathleen Selkirk approached the food bank asking for any extra food donations it could pass on to the shelter.

To Selkirk's surprise the food bank turned around and handed her a lump sum of money - enough to keep the soup kitchen afloat for the next three months.

"We were just running out of money," Selkirk said. "We were going to try and get by on community donations, as much as we could, but it would not provide regular meals anymore."

The homeless shelter can house 18 people and at the beginning of March was nearing full with 14 guests.

"I'm working on getting another bedroom in there so it boots us up to 22," Selkirk said, which could mean eight more meals each day.

Bob Mumford, who works with the food bank, said over the past four years the food bank team has worked hard to meet the criteria for charity bingos which has helped generate a small surplus of funds.

"When this request came from the homeless shelter we thought this would be a nice alliance because they've always been in trouble looking for money," Mumford said from the stocked trailer where he gives away an average of 30 to 40 packages of food each week.

"Since we right now are really fortunate, we can do this."

The Inuvik Food Bank feeds around 200 families and hands out an average of 2,000 bags of food each year.

Adding to the $5,000, the food bank has offered an additional $1,000 each month after three months as long as the revenue from the bingos keeps coming in - but that may change.

"Right now we make almost all of our money from bingos," Mumford said. "Now they're thinking of changing the structure of the bingo licensing."

He said each organization has to individually meet all the criteria the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs sets out for bingo licenses. Once the criteria is met organizations are given a date to hold their event and have to organize the rest.

Mumford said proposed changes would divide all the bingo revenue evenly through each charity. Mumford said volunteers' hard work has allowed the food bank to consistently raise five or six times what other Inuvik charities do.

"Right now we're in a very favourable position, I mean we do really well on bingos, and if they made the changes they're proposing it would probably cost us up $5,000 to $10,000 per bingo," he said.

"When we first made the decision to go for bingos, about three or four years ago, we barely had enough to pay for the licence," Mumford said, "And now we have a surplus, so this is why we're in a position to help them."

He said with the surplus the food bank is also able to give out fuller food packages adding items such as coffee and cereal and other products they couldn't afford before.

"The value of what we're giving out has increased," Mumford said.

The Food Bank gladly takes food donations but Mumford said the money they get from bingo buys things they need from NorthMart and Stanton's, where they can order cases of specific items and are given a discount.

"And we can specify certain brands; some brands are half the price of others for virtually the same product," Mumford said.

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