Emergency Food Plan

The Emergency Food Plan (EFP) is a collaborative, civil society initiative that has been developed to address the challenges related to food access and its associated impacts on health and wellbeing during emergency events in the City of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

The EFP has been developed to act as a public strategy to compliment the City of Thunder Bay’s Emergency Plan. This plan offers the municipality a coordinated network of civil society actors with expertise in food access, as well as a commitment to provide key physical infrastructure and human resources in the event an emergency food response is needed.

Purpose: To address emerging challenges related to food security and its associated impacts on health and wellbeing during emergency events, especially for vulnerable populations.

Scope: Addresses medium or high-level impacts from emergencies at a local, regional, or national level that impact the community’s ability to bring food in, distribute it fairly, and/or ensure safe preparation and consumption for larger subsets of the population.

Objectives:

• Ensure food access for all during emergencies;
• Keep essential food access services open during emergencies;
• Support social equity in regard to food access during emergencies through employing an ethic of dignified food access in all facets of the response;
• Support the return of ‘normal’ food access activities as quickly as possible, while considering how food insecurity needs may have been changed by the emergency;
• Maintain a network of partners who commit to key roles and responsibilities in actioning a response;
• Ensure collaborative stewardship and maintenance of the plan; and
• Identify and implement future objectives for strengthening the EFP.

The development of the EFP has been coordinated by the TBAFS in partnership with the City of Thunder Bay and a group of 11 Primary Partners with expertise in food security and food access. The plan is stewarded through the TBAFS chaired Food Access Coalition and the Emergency Food Plan Coordinator, who acts as a steward of the plan through the TBAFS.

The EFP utilizes the overarching principles of an incident command structure to help quickly and effectively organize an emergency food response, as well as easily streamline the EFP into the City’s larger Emergency Plan protocols if needed. The structure of the plan is described through a concept of operations that is broken into four sections, as seen in the image of the Concept of Operations.

The response component of the concept of operations is called the Food Branch Organizational Chart and is comprised of six key incident management functions of an emergency food response – Food Branch Command, and the General Staff sections of Procurement, Distribution & Access, Meal Service, Finance & Administration, and Base & Staging Area – as seen in the Food Branch Response Structure image.