Students at Cairine Wilson Secondary School in Orléans raided their families’ cupboards and went door to door in the community last week to collect over 4,000 food items for the Ottawa Food Bank.

The Hallowe’en for Hunger food drive has been an important student-driven initiative for more than 25 years. For the past several years, it’s been organized be members of the student R.I.S.E. Club which stand for Rejuvenate, Inclusivity and Sustainability in Education.

This year’s co-lead organizers were Grade 10 students Anika Suthakaran and Mackenzie Joanisse.

The pair first joined the R.I.S.E Club last year as a way to become involved at the school while helping others.

“It’s a pretty big tradition here,” says Suthakaran. “And we both really wanted to take the lead in co-organizing the drive this year.”

Suthakaran and Joanisse led a team of more than 40 of their fellow students in collecting and organizing the food donations.

They had even more help when it came to packing the more than 4,000 items in boxes and loading it on to the Ottawa Food Bank trucks last Friday.

“It was really nice to see how much people really cared and wanted to help, especially in the rainy weather, because it made it a lot harder to collect the food,” says Joanisse
It took several hours to load all the food on to the truck which had to make two trips to the Food Bank’s warehouse.

“Just seeing the truck being filled was a really big deal for me, knowing that our contribution will help so many people,” says Suthakaran.

The food items will be distributed to community food banks around the city depending on the need.

Ottawa-area food banks have seen a significant increase in demand this year, which has mirrored a similar situation across Ontario and the entire country, which is on top of a record increase in demand in 2024 when over one million Canadians had to rely on their local food bank for emergency food supplies at some point during the year.

According to the Ottawa Food Bank, food bank usage in the city is up by 90 per cent since 2019, and the number of Ottawa households that struggle to afford food nearly doubled between 2022 and 2023. And while there are no official figures available yet for 2025, the number of people who are calling on their food bank for help has continued to rise, according to the people who handle the day-to-day operations of the food banks.

If you would like to make a contribution to a food bank in our area, you can contact either the Gloucester Emergency Food Cupboard, the Orléans Cumberland Community Resource Centre food bank, or the Community Compassion Centre food bank.