Our time spent working with our 2023 grant recipient, Food Stash Foundation, is winding down, and it’s been a productive year.

Earlier this year, the Vancouver-based food recovery charity had been busy forming the Collective for Climate Accountability, a community of non-profits who want to track their greenhouse gas emissions. Food Stash utilized the grant from Project Change to support professional development for their employees and received guidance from one of our mentors to assist with enhancing business practices and clarifying the goals and direction of the organization through the lens of its values.

Since then, Food Stash has made more progress toward the goal it came to Project Change Foundation to achieve: to expand greenhouse gas accounting in the non-profit sphere, as well as reduce climate change-fuelling practices. It’s nearly ready to register its Project Change-supported project with the Local Carbon Registry, which it anticipates will have reduced net emissions, says Stephanie Shulhan, Food Stash’s development manager.

Shulhan and Heather Farmer from Sole Food Street Farm, a member of the Collective for Climate Accountability whom Food Stash delivered GHG accounting training to as part of its Project Change project, are levelling up their sustainability management planning skills by taking the Environmental Metrics and Sustainability Reporting Micro-Certificate through the UBC Master of Food and Resource Economics program. The work of their two organizations caught the eye of the program’s project manager who invited them to take the certificate free-of-charge in exchange for participating in feedback interviews.

Food Stash is successfully leveraging the support it has received from Project Change Foundation to grow their organizational capacity and forge connections that result in more resilient charities that are making healthful impacts in their communities.

“Overall, Food Stash is now rescuing over 120,000 pounds of food each month that would otherwise have gone to waste,” Shulhan says. “Food Stash supports 35 charitable community partner organizations – mostly in the downtown eastside of Vancouver – with regular deliveries of food for their essential programs, collectively reaching over 10,000 people each week.”

Read more about Food Stash Foundation on their website.