The Food Sharing Project in Kingston, Ontario, has received a donation of more than $12,000 to help provide snacks and meals to thousands of local students. This money was raised by the west-end COBS Bread store located at the RioCan Centre on Gardiners Road.
The bakery raised the funds during its annual month-long campaign that ended on March 7, 2026. On the final day of the event, the store donated $2 from every six-pack of hot cross buns sold to help the local charity buy healthy food for children.
The donation will support nutrition programs at 88 schools across the Kingston, Frontenac, and Lennox and Addington area. Every week, volunteers pack more than 450 boxes of food with an accumulated weight of over nine tonnes to ensure students have enough to eat while they are in class.
This support comes at a time when local leaders say more families are having trouble paying for groceries. Kingston City Council declared a food insecurity emergency in early 2025, as one in three local households now report struggling to get enough food.
While the federal National School Food Program was recently made permanent, the charity still needs community support. Provincial funding through the Ontario Student Nutrition Program has not increased since 2014, and local donors now provide about 30 percent of the money needed to run the school food program each year.
