Taloyoak trying to open soup kitchen during cold snap
Listen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.The hamlet of Taloyoak is trying to open its soup kitchen to help residents in the midst of extreme winter weather. Environment Canada had an orange warning about the cold and a yellow warning about a blizzard in place for the Nunavut hamlet as of Thursday morning, and temperatures were expected to feel as cold as –54 C with the wind chill. In an email Wednesday afternoon, Taloyoak’s SAO Adham Adose said the hamlet was reviewing its budget to see if it could open the soup kitchen for a few days to help those in need because of the extreme cold. As of Thursday morning, however, the cold was hampering even those efforts. “It appears we are experiencing a plumbing issue due to the extreme weather conditions. Our maintenance team is currently working to resolve it,” Adose said. Mayor Lenny Panigayak gave CBC News a tour of the soup kitchen earlier in the week. He said the idea for it came from the previous hamlet council, and work to transform the old council chambers into a space for cooking and eating wrapped up a little more than a year ago. But, he said, the hamlet doesn’t have money to run the space consistently. That’s something he’s working on. Panigayak said he’d like to have the space open and offering free meals to people 3 to 5 days a week. “There are people out there that are going to sleep hungry, even children they are going to sleep hungry,” said Panigayak. He said you can see evidence of this on social media — residents posting on community pages asking for food and leftovers. “I’m guessing maybe 500 [people] at least that are always hungry,” he said. That’s about 40 per cent of the community’s roughly 1,200 residents. “To have it open would feed a lot of people, to make sure that they had something in their stomach at least that day and they go to sleep full.”Panigayak said his community is the third most expensive place to live in Nunavut.The government of Nunavut pays its employees a northern allowance to make up for the different economic conditions in communities. The Department of Human Resources said employees living in Taloyoak get the third highest allowance of all 25 communities. What do residents think? Vera Paniloo, who has lived in Taloyoak for 25 years, thinks having the soup kitchen open regularly is a good idea. She said two bags of groceries costs around $300.“If it was less… coulda bought more groceries, but like it’s too expensive to buy groceries now,” she said. Vera Paniloo, who has lived in Taloyoak for 25 years, welcomes the idea of a regular soup kitchen to help people eat. (Liny Lamberink/CBC)The soup kitchen, meanwhile, could help feed people — especially children and elders. She’d like to help bring food to elders who can’t make it to the space themselves, and said she’d grab a bowl of something to eat for herself and her mother too.Joshua Bressette, another Taloyoak resident, worries having the soup kitchen open a few days a week isn’t enough.“My main concern about that is for the kids. I’ve had my own experiences up here seeing kids having to steal in order to eat, and with the soup kitchen being opened up for only a certain amount of days, I feel that isn’t sufficient enough to meet the needs for people’s food needs."Bressette, who has struggled with food security himself at times, said the winter months can be particularly difficult. Joshua Bressette said having the soup kitchen open every day would better meet his community's needs. However, he's also skeptical of the idea because he knows finding the money to operate it will be a challenge. (Liny Lamberink/CBC)“I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work an income stable job at the moment, but whenever people don’t make a certain amount of wages during the winter season when the prices really go up, it can be really hard on themselves, and more so the family, because a lot of the people up here are mainly providing for others rather than themselves," he said.While he’d like to see the soup kitchen operate every day, he’s also skeptical about the idea because of how difficult it’ll be to find the funding.How's the space being used now? Panigayak said it would cost about $50,000 a year to have one person working at the soup kitchen. That doesn’t account for the cost of the food or keeping the lights and heat on, or the fact that, ideally, there would be two staff.He’s hoping the Kitikmeot Inuit Association and Nunavut government will help kick in funds to run the space.Right now, the soup kitchen operates sporadically. It last opened to run a breakfast program for kids during the Christmas holidays when the school — which offers kids breakfast — was closed, said Panigayak.Adose, the SAO, said the hamlet was also working with the school to host hot lunch programs, but that it hadn’t confirmed funding support yet.
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