By Jenn Kelland
Outreach workers from the Union Mission will be distributing self-heating meals to the homeless and the poor in the Centretown area this winter, as a result of a project funded by local businesses.
In a campaign led by the Ottawa Business Journal, companies are being asked to purchase Hot Packs for the Ottawa Food Bank, which then delivers them to community agencies like the Mission.
Hot Packs are meals that come with a heating pad filled with an iron-magnesium alloy. The pad heats up with the addition of 40 millilitres of salt water, also included in the package. When the pad is then wrapped around the foil-encased meal and left in the box for 12 minutes, the food becomes so hot it steams.
“We’re really quite excited about these,” says Diane Morrison, director of the Mission on Waller Street.
She says Hot Packs will especially benefit people who stay on the streets and those who don’t have a stove or a microwave to make a hot dinner.
Peter Tilley, acting executive director of the food bank says the Mission is one of many agencies in the city which will receive Hot Packs for distribution.
“If you’ve got a rooming house that is poorly heated or maybe doesn’t have kitchen facilities or something (the Hot Packs) could end up there — anything like that.”
Each pack costs close to $5, and Tilley says the Food Bank has about 30,000 ready to hand out.
Major Cliff Hollman, community relations director for the Salvation Army, says although it’s an expensive project, the Hot Packs do serve a useful purpose.
“Anything helps. It’s hard to take a hot meal out to people,” he says. “If they don’t need (the Hot Pack) right then and there, they can heat it up as they go,” he says.
The campaign to generate support from the business community began Oct. 26 and will run until Dec. 15. David Luxton, president of the Ottawa Business Journal, says it has not been hard to find donors, although they still need at least 20,000 more packs to reach their goal.
“You don’t normally get corporate response to mere press coverage,” he says. “It was encouraging that before even starting the campaign we have had companies responding.”
For now, Morrison has boxes of the meals stacked in the Mission’s storage room. She says they’ll bring them out as the weather gets colder. She intends to give some to outreach workers who can take the packs right to people on the streets. Morrison says the Hot Packs will not change routine at the Mission.
“We’ll still have two soup lines a day,” she says.