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| Path: Main Street : NewsWeek : Archive : Funder Focus : Article |
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Funder Focus: Martha O'Connor and Breakfast for Learning
May 1, 2006
By Elisa Birnbaum
This month in our Funder Focus we feature Breakfast for Learning: Canadian Living Foundation, Canada's only national nonprofit organization solely dedicated to supporting child nutrition. CharityVillage spoke with executive director Martha O'Connor about the foundation's efforts to feed Canada's children, its unique approach to funding, and the innovative programs it supports.
CharityVillage: The foundation began in 1992 through a very unique initiative. Can you describe its beginnings?
Martha O'Connor: It was actually initiated by the editors of Canadian Living magazine, who were researching a story idea on child poverty in Canada. They were personally appalled to discover the extent of child poverty and the consequences for the kids. And when the article ran in May 1992, the response from readers was similar to their own. People were writing in and saying, "We don't want to be living in a country where kids are going hungry. What can we do?" And that really galvanized the editors to capture the goodwill on behalf of Canada's children using the communication tool of the magazine. So they approached the owners of the magazine with a proposal to start a charitable foundation in partnership with the magazine, which would help them communicate the issue and garner support. And they were successful; they created the foundation as a separately incorporated charitable public foundation. The foundation has received support from the magazine but stayed independent over the years.
CV: What's the status of your relationship with Canadian Living magazine today?
MO: Initially, we had an article in every issue of Canadian Living, and we used the pages to do fundraising. We went through a period where it wasn't as consistent, but we are now enjoying a renaissance of support. Today, we have space in the magazine to talk about what we're doing.
CV: What type of grants do you provide?
MO: We fund community-based groups that are providing nutrition programs for children. They may not be registered charitable organizations but are community groups that have come together to feed kids. Last year, we funded about 2,500 community groups and we have in excess of 5,000 programs running across the country. We cover about 20% of the costs to run a program which, on average, comes out to approximately $2,000 each.
CV: What specific criteria do you look for in applicants?
MO: Because of our narrow focus, we don't have a broad range of applicants. What we look for are indicators of them being integral to the community. And a key criteria is that parents be involved and be given an opportunity to participate in the programs. The programs are primarily school-based. We might have a teacher wanting to start up a program and we would counsel them to engage the broader community.
We have a national mandate and we are serving every community across Canada. We have an organizational structure that supports that. Applicants are reviewed by provincially-based review committees in every province and territory.
CV: It's been almost 15 years since the foundation was established. Has it evolved at all in its mandate or focus?
MO: We really have evolved away from our initial focus of a response to child poverty. It didn't take us too long to clue into the potential for stigmatizing children by setting up programs in response to poverty. There is an acknowledgement that feeding kids is a parental responsibility and if parents aren't able to do that, it's very stigmatizing. So in order not to stigmatize participants, we require that the programs we support be accessible to all children in the community and that parents be given that opportunity to contribute.
Alongside that, over the years, with increasing research about the link between proper nutrition and learning, and growing awareness of the importance of proper nutrition, especially with the obesity issue, we are seeing that these programs need to benefit all the children. So we have a much bigger mandate than we had initially. There are lots of reasons why kids are going to school without the proper nutrition and poverty is just one of them. It could be long bus rides, sports activities before school, they're running late, or are physiologically not ready.
CV: Where does Canada stand today with regard to the issue of child nutrition? What are the challenges still facing the foundation?
MO: Interestingly enough, Canada is at an unusual place with regard to feeding kids at school. It's not part of our culture, our history, whereas in every other industrialized nation and many third world countries, it is part of the culture that kids have access to food at school. There are institutionalized government-supported feeding programs; feeding and school go hand in hand. In the US, for example, they've had school feeding programs since the 1940s, and today it's supported to the tune of $11 billion annually.
So we're trying hard to change that. Across Canada, we're supporting the work of more than 30,000 volunteers. We do have a long way to go but the good news is that because of the lack of institutionalized government support, what has evolved in Canada is a model that is actually better, in my view, than what you get in the institutionalized programs. In Canada, [the programs] are volunteer-driven and the volunteers are there because they care about kids, so you get a whole component of the program that is beyond nutrition. It's about nurturing and caring and you don't get that in an institutionalized program.
CV: The foundation aligns itself with many partners and groups. Can you explain how that came about and provide some partnering examples?
MO: We're very big on aligning ourselves with other groups. It's really driven from a community and principle-based approach and by our beliefs that children are everyone's responsibility. While feeding kids is a core family responsibility, we can all play a role in supporting families in fulfilling that responsibility. Of course, underlying that notion is what the readers and initial founders believed: no one wants to be living in a country where kids are going hungry.
So we have a grants program called the Community Partners Program where we give money to a partnership in the community. Typically, that will consist of representation from the educational sector or health sector or the private sector and volunteers like the Boys and Girls Club, a Rotary Club or a church group. We bring them around the table to talk about how they can best support the program in the way that will give parents an opportunity to be involved, making it community-driven as opposed to externally driven. With this program, we're essentially institutionalizing partnership.
Then from the opposite extreme, we have an interesting partnership in Ontario with the Grocery Industry Foundation. It's an industry foundation that is comprised of all retailers and vendors in the grocery industry. They have within their mandate a desire to support children's feeding programs. So we've partnered with them; they provide access to food through all the grocery stores and we're distributing it out to the programs through food vouchers that can be redeemed at the local grocery stores.
We've also partnered recently with Dairy Farmers to produce a nutrition education resource. It's a fun, educational tool, a game for kids that we're distributing out to the programs we support. It's free of charge and it helps kids learn about how to achieve proper nutrition.
CV: The foundation is about to launch a new program called Keys to Success. Can you tell me more about the project?
MO: Well, we've never just given grants; from the very beginning we've complemented our grants with tools and resources to support them. This program speaks to our principle of being community-driven. It came about from our desire to institute some quality standards in the programs we were supporting. We asked the programs we support across the country what they felt constituted their best practices. And I'm delighted to say that after a lot of research and lot of consultation, we will be launching a web-based self-evaluation tool where the people working in the programs can go to the web site and they can evaluate themselves against the criteria. Where they are not meeting the criteria, we will have links to resources to help them achieve those best practices.
We are capturing all the data and we will see where there are gaps, where the programs are struggling. The data will help our own resource development and potentially improve our grantmaking to make it more targeted to the areas with the greatest need. And it will also help develop resources to help those programs achieve those best practices - the keys to success. The process has taken six years and we will be test-piloting it in the next few weeks and making it available to the programs in September.
CV: Where do you see the foundation going in the next ten years?
MO: Thus far, we have been very growth-oriented and evolutionary. It's been an organic growth, very responsive to what's happening in the communities. I think that over the next number of years we will be building stronger relationships with government and getting more consistency as we move forward. We're seeing that already in Keys to Success; we're growing together but are connected to community in such a way that it's coming together now. There's been lots of connecting the dots and we'll be seeing more of that. We will be speaking more in unison, with one voice, from all over Canada.
I do believe that the notion of children having access to food at school will always be around since it's not connected to poverty. It's much more positively framed at strong, healthy, happy children. So we're going to have to have considerable, systemic change in order for that to take place. Assuming that we have systemic change, I do believe there is a potential role for the foundation to play in this model that we are espousing. It hasn't been determined exactly how that might look because we're dealing with the system and policies and really the social fabric, so where we fit in is yet to be determined. But we will be moving toward a clearer definition of that over the next ten years.
With past experience at the Trillium Foundation, Martha O'Connor took on a new challenge in the role of executive director of Breakfast for Learning upon its inception in 1992. Though she initially worked part-time, an increasing level of duties and responsibilities at the foundation led to her current full-time status - and a staff of fifteen. For more information about the foundation, visit: www.breakfastforlearning.ca.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.
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