How KAF Food Bank is building a food system that works for everyone

“You can’t find a way to help people not to go hungry and shy away from it,” Dr. Godwin Ude, executive director at Kingdom Acts Foundation (KAF) Food Bank, said.  

Growing up in Nigeria, Ude says he never saw anyone in his community go hungry. Food was available, and more importantly, it was shared.

“Food has a deeper meaning. From my part of Africa, food isa connector. It is about social connection. It’s about bonding. Community building. You don’t visit someone and go home without eating,” he explained, noting that hospitality was not optional. “You must have something presented to you and you are encouraged to accept it. You are not supposed to reject it. We brought that concept here.”

After immigrating to Canada in 2004 with a pharmaceutical background, Ude expected to continue along that path. But he started working with youth groups, supporting basketball and music programs, and his focus shifted from pharmacy into community and social programming.

Ude moved to British Columbia in 2010 and began working at KAF in Surrey, an organization serving the community through youth engagement and social supports. By 2012, KAF had expanded its services to include food support, putting on community barbecues and implementing wraparound services for youth, seniors, newcomers, single parents and families.

When a nearby food bank closed during the pandemic, Ude saw the escalating demand for support and knew that KAF needed to respond.

“My experience growing up in an African community where nobody went hungry continues to ring in my mind. There should not be any reason why any person in Canada should go hungry,” Ude said, referencing that Second Harvest’s research that shows enough food to feed 17 million people goes uneaten in Canada every year.

The surge in demand came at a personal and financial cost.

In 2021, with little external support, Ude faced the possibility of shutting the food bank down as expenses mounted and the crisis stretched on longer than expected. Ude was spending entire days driving across the region from 7a.m. to 10p.m, collecting donations posted on the Second Harvest Food Rescue App to ensure the food bank could meet community needs. In one year, he added 35,000 km to their delivery vehicle.

“I was driving thinking, ‘How long can we go on like this?’” Ude said. “But then I thought, ‘How will you sleep at night, knowing you found a way to support families, and you gave up because it required a lot of work?’”

“We changed our mindset,” Ude explained. “Believe in abundance. There is food. It just requires work.”

To turn that belief into action, KAF expanded its capacity. The organization invested in a refrigerated vehicle and built a walk-in freezer to store more food. They worked with their grocery store partners, providing them with reuseable totes for donations to ensure more food wasn’t lost to spills or poor packaging.

Today, KAF Food Bank serves over 14,000 people each month, operating on a model of choice, with no limits to the amount of support people can receive.

“People come here because they feel respected and honoured here,” Ude said. “People respond to where they are cared for, where they are loved.”

For Ude, the work is also about persistence and creating solutions when systems fail. He emphasizes that hunger in Canada is not a result of scarcity, but affordability and access.

“What we did was not give up. If the system becomes a barrier that can’t bend or yield, instead of giving up, you create a parallel system,” he said.

Through it all, Ude’s work is guided by the belief that food can build connection and community, and that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. He emphasized the need for policy changes so that everyone has enough money to buy groceries.

“Until then, we will continue to support people.”

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