Brandy Bobier: 4.5 Million Pounds of Rescued Food

We sit down with Brandy Bobier, CEO and co-founder of Community Helpers Unite (CHU), an Indigenous-led nonprofit and social enterprise with roots in Winnipeg’s North End. Brandy was running a catering business when the pandemic hit, and she watched people in the North End and Point Douglas go without food entirely. So CHU started saying yes: emergency hampers at any hour of the night, food bundles for outreach workers heading into wellness checks with families involved with CFS, and extra food for agencies that couldn’t keep up.

Five years later, CHU supplies more than 40 Winnipeg agencies and 13 First Nations communities, and last year it kept over four and a half million pounds of food out of the landfill. It runs almost entirely on its own catering revenue rather than core funding.

We’re talking:

• Why Manitoba’s food waste problem and its poverty problem should be solving each other, and why so much good food ends up in Winnipeg’s landfill
• What changes when food comes before housing, mental health and addictions supports rather than after them
• Why CHU stayed a nonprofit social enterprise instead of becoming a registered charity, and what a “yes model” makes possible
• Running a no-yelling kitchen with a staff benefit plan in an industry that rarely offers either

Whether you’ve got leftover trays from an event and nowhere to take them, or you’re curious how a local organization reaches this scale without waiting on grants, this conversation shows what treating food as a human right looks like on the ground in Winnipeg.

As Brandy puts it: “Everybody likes to talk about housing first, addictions first, mental health first, education first. It’s always something else first. How do you make it to your housing appointment if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? Food is the base of all of it.”

Get Involved:

• Search “food” and your postal code at 211manitoba.ca to find food programs nearby, or places that will accept surplus food from your event
• Book CHU for your next catered event; catering revenue funds their community programs
• Join the Main Street Walkers, who head out from 605 Main every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 a.m.

Connect with CHU: communityhelpersunite.ca