BradfordToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). BradfordToday received the following open letter from Gord and Nancy Young in response to the column 'Tis the season: Helping Hands Food Bank needs help.
Open Letter to the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and Council:
With interest and dismay, we read the article on BradfordToday, Dec. 5 about the Helping Hands Food Bank.
Carolyn Khan and her volunteers do tremendous work and should be commended.
Many people are very generous and give freely to the food bank to help the less fortunate. Times are hard and people are hurting.
But did you know that each month the food bank is now being charged $4,400 rent per month in the new town building on Church Street?
That money will not go toward food but must go to pay for what should be a town service. When we donate, it's for food, not rent.
Gift cards will now be our way of supporting the food bank.
Also, the Out of the Cold program plus A Hand Up Free Clothing Room will be paying rent. That’s tens of thousands of dollars per year for a volunteer group giving shelter to the homeless or people needing to get out of the cold weather. There is no overnight shelter in BWG for the homeless.
The old community centre would be a suitable place to have a shelter. There is a kitchen, bathrooms, etc. that a lot of the time are not in use.
These volunteer groups are paying rent trying to help those desperately in need.
We hope our town councillors, the mayor and deputy mayor are proud of this. We certainly are not and are really disgusted with the help they are giving these two organizations.
We need to support these two groups but need to do so in a way that the money goes to the clients, not the town coffers.
Yours truly,
Gord and Nancy Young
