True to form, Chris Hergesheimer used his platform, upon receiving the King Charles III Coronation Medal, to call for transformation.
Colleagues, bandmates, family and friends gathered at Seaside Centre Monday to celebrate Hergesheimer’s award. In the ceremony MC’d by friend and former campaign manager Steve Wright, colleagues offered praise to the passionate community advocate, who, among many other hats, is lead food programmer for Sunshine Coast Community Services Society (SCCSS). Four years ago, Hergesheimer took on the task of transforming the organization’s food program.
“Chris has worked tirelessly to create multiple access points for people to find not just healthy food and nourishment, but also connection and dignity,” said Carey Rumba, a program manager at SCCSS. “His work is guided by a clear understanding that food security is not just about hunger, it's about poverty, isolation, systemic barriers, and so solutions need to be wholistic and empowering and climate-centred.”
Katie Orr, provincial manager for national standards at Food Banks BC, who travels to food banks across B.C., said when she heard about the coronation medal to honour community service, she immediately thought of Hergesheimer. “Chris just has this way of kind of doing everything through a lens of empowerment and dignity and seeing the larger system at play,” she said. “And it is hard work, right? It requires resilience and it requires holding struggle and hope together.”
Addressing Hergesheimer, Orr told him, “You've changed lives.”
Then, Hergesheimer took to the podium. With his signature energy, Hergesheimer confessed that following his political campaign last year, he was running out of steam, looking at the systems that needed to change and the challenges ahead.
But as he was headed on vacation, he received the email that he had received this medal. “It's great to be recognized personally, and it does put a little bit of wind in your sails, but this is deep, deep community work."
He addressed his gathered community. “We've [done] great, great things together.
“I will accept this personal recognition, knowing that there is so much work to be done and this is our work.”
Investment pitch to his community
“Food insecurity is this super, super complex beast,” said Hergesheimer, who holds a PhD in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems from UBC and who spent the past 18 months working on a post-doctoral fellowship at Royal Roads University looking at basic income guarantee.
“It's enmeshed in the transnational, global agricultural supply that's precarious, and wound up with corporations who are consolidating and controlling the food supply and intellectual property.
“Meanwhile, you've got this other side of it, where small farmers are being squeezed out by market forces and development pressures, and they can't make a living, and can't compete in the marketplace,” he said. “When you wrap food insecurity into that huge picture, it is completely and utterly overwhelming. And you think, what in the world can we possibly do to impact this?
“On the other hand of the equation, it is so glaringly simple. Give people money. Food insecurity is directly tied to poverty and in a rich liberal democracy like Canada, poverty is a policy failure.”
Without addressing the root cause of food insecurity –– poverty, low incomes –– food banks will flounder not from bad intentions or a lack of volunteers, but because of resource constraints and system changes that cannot happen fast enough to address the issue, said Hergesheimer.
“Once we realize that we cannot separate food insecurity from income insecurity, things change, and the question of food security becomes one of rights and justice and inequity.”
“If food insecurity could be solved by giving out more food, we would have solved this problem decades ago,” he said and called for a change from the status quo.
When he took on the role of lead food programmer at Sunshine Coast Community Services four years ago, he was given a mandate to transition from the traditional food bank model into “an inclusive community food hub that represents social justice in the community.”
Now, Hergesheimer proposed a language shift, from “donating” to the food bank, to “investing.”
“Because when you invest in something, you expect or hope for a return on your investment,” he said. “In our case, it's not an economic return, but it is a social return. It is a community return that will play out over years ahead, through greater access to the social determinants of health.”
Hergesheimer made four commitments to his peers gathered before him, a commitment to investors:
One, continuing to provide the food bank model to meet supplementary need in the community –– but that will also continuously evolve and adapt.
Two, diversification of offerings –– as SCCSS has done so far with food programs, affordable market, coupon programs, budget-conscious cooking programs. “We know that food bank usage is a poor indicator of food insecurity, only about 20 per cent of the people who self-identify as food insecure access the food bank,” he added. SCCSS is gradually adding more ways to access food, “So we don't end up with a food bank and a grocery store and a gulf in between that seems impossible to cross.”
Three, food as inclusion and building community, “Food plays an integral role in bringing people together, and we have incredible opportunity on deck with this new [Community Services] building to do things that we cannot even imagine are possible in terms of feeding people and bringing people together.”
Four, advocacy. “We have to say, this is an income issue. This is not a food issue. We have to say, what does it mean to provide minimum income floors,” he said. “We have one time in the history of food banks where food bank numbers declined significantly, when there were income supports during the 2020 pandemic.”
Offering thanks, Hergesheimer urged his gathered peers to stay the course in transforming systems (including with the completion of the SCCSS building next year). “I know what the end result is going to be, and I know that it's a more healthy, inclusive and thriving community, where our neighbours don't have to worry about putting food on their tables.”
