TORONTO — The Toronto Blue Jays’ home stadium, the Rogers Centre, is being turned into a temporary food hamper sorting centre in support of Food Banks Canada’s Covid-19 response, Rogers Communications and the Jays Care Foundation announced Monday.
As part of the new Step Up to the Plate initiative, Rogers Centre will house 6,000 pallets containing 10 million pounds of food which will be sorted into food hampers on the field and delivered across the country to families in need. Each hamper will be filled with a variety of non-perishable food items, providing one individual with a week’s worth of food, says the news release. The goal is to fill 390,000 hampers, for a total of eight million meals.
Hundreds of Rogers employees and their families will be volunteering to sort the food hampers as part of Rogers’s annual “Give Together” volunteer program, with hundreds more Rogers employees across the country volunteering as the food hampers make their way to local food banks throughout Canada, says the release. The company will also be tapping its personalized mobile retail team, Rogers Pro On-the-Go, to help with deliveries on the ground.
“At Rogers, we consider all Canadians to be part of our extended family and we believe we have a responsibility to give back and help our family members in need,” said Melinda Rogers-Hixon, deputy chairman of the Rogers board, in the release. “With Rogers Centre vacant until baseball returns, we have an exciting opportunity to open our pantry of assets and offer a much-needed resource for Food Banks Canada.”
“We have a strong tradition of community service at Rogers, and our 25,000 strong team members across the country are here to give together and give back to Canadians when they need it most. Along with our employees, customers, and fans, we have already contributed more than 2 million meals to Food Banks Canada through Covid-19 and we are excited to roll up our sleeves to help fill more plates for Canadians relying on these donations,” added company president and CEO Joe Natale.
Step Up to the Plate is an extension of Rogers’s initiative in March, in which the company launched a national awareness and fundraising campaign for Food Banks Canada through Rogers’s media assets. This is also the 36th consecutive year the Blue Jays have supported Food Banks Canada, through the annual Lady Jays Food Drive, the ballclub’s longest-running community initiative.
“Covid-19 has had a disproportionately harsh impact on Canadians who were already facing hardships. In response, we doubled down on our efforts to address food insecurity in communities and, together with our partners and fans, have contributed more than 1.5 million meals. We’re excited to join Rogers and leverage our ballpark to provide even more meals to Canadians in need,” said Robert Witchel, executive director of the Jays Care Foundation.
Rogers says it consulted with Toronto Public Health to ensure all necessary precautions are taken for the health and safety of the volunteers and all those involved in the Step Up to the Plate program.
