By Lara Fominoff @fomsy1 on Twitter

Lethbridge Interfaith Food Bank receives $150,000 donation for expansion

Jun 16, 2017 | 2:52 PM

LETHBRIDGE – The Interfaith Food Bank is receiving a $150,000 donation from South Country Co-op, to help with the 3rd phase of its three-phase expansion project. 
 
The donation was made Friday (June 16) as the food bank celebrated National Garden Day with a free community barbeque in its “Learning Garden.”
 
The project will not only expand client services, but create large community rooms and a commercial kitchen with a 100 person capacity.
 
Executive Director of the Interfaith Food Bank, Danielle McIntyre, says there’s a huge demand for this type of facility.
 
“We’ve had overwhelming response from people wanting to use our kitchen here, and we run programs in there all the time, so we need more space to do that. Also, the kitchen we are building is going to be a large community room that will allow people to run different kinds of programming in there.”
 
Marketing and Community Relations Manager for South Country Co-op, Carmen Hudson, says if there’s an opportunity for them to help out in the community, they’ll do so.
 
“The idea behind it is to give back to the communities that we live and work in to make them better, safer and productive places.”
 
McIntyre says Phase 1 of the project gets underway this fall at a cost of $56,000 and includes accessing the front portion of the warehouse where the Interfaith Food Bank is currently housed.
 
Phase 2, which she says they’re still actively fundraising for, includes creating a number of client service rooms, classrooms, a lunchroom and a fitness studio at an estimated cost of $106,000.
 
Phase 3 will include building a community kitchen space that will cost nearly $300,000.
 
The entire project is expected to be completed sometime in 2019.