Squamish Helping Hands Society
Food Programs Infographic

In January 2020, I took a class called “Community Health: Asset Mapping in Squamish“. The course centred around a handful of Squamish-based social service organizations that identified a need for a Squamish Social Service Asset Map, not only for internal use, but even more so to assist people in need to easily access solutions.

Throughout the course, we held interviews with point people from each organization to further flesh out how we could be of service to them and what they might specifically want from this asset map.

Myself and a group of classmates focussed on the Squamish Helping Hands Society, an organization that works to fight homelessness and provides support to low income families in Squamish though shelter, food and community.

In our interviews, it was brought up that SHHS’s food programs are not exclusively accessible to homeless folks, but for anyone in need of support - whatever that might look like. As such, they have a whole range of programs to redistribute rescued food to address different needs. For example, they provide hot meals directly at the shelter, as well as food hampers to be picked up by an adult at the shelter to take home, and school lunches delivered to local schools.

However, SHHS acknowledges the stigma associated with accepting donated food and hoped to shift this narrative by focussing on the positives of eating rescued food: reducing food waste. It is also for this reason that they plan to open a Pay-What-You-Can grocery store in the near future. This way, shoppers may visit because they need financial assistance or to help reduce food waste, and no one has to know.

I created this infographic for SHHS to help them communicate all of this information in a succinct and aesthetic manner.