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Tri-Cities to help fill Share's shelves

City halls are gearing up for the fourth Tri-City Food Bank Challenge to help stock the Share Food Bank shelves for the post-Christmas lull. Port Moody Coun.

City halls are gearing up for the fourth Tri-City Food Bank Challenge to help stock the Share Food Bank shelves for the post-Christmas lull.

Port Moody Coun. Diana Dilworth kicked off the lead-up to the challenge, which runs June 1 to 21, at last week's council meeting.

"It's an effort to fill the food bank coffers in the summer, which is often a challenging time for them, so we came up with the city hall challenge," Dilworth said Tuesday. Each of the Tri-City councils are challenging each other, their staff and their residents to generate the most food for the food bank.

In the past three years the challenge has raised 32,370 pounds of food, said Heather Scott, director of development at Share.

"Cities...can play a very big role in terms of raising awareness of hunger in their own communities," Scott said. "Tri-City residents are very generous people, and they want to make sure others in their community have enough food."

Each of the cities will have collection points throughout city hall and city-owned facilities to make it easy for people to donate food.

Scott said the Christmas season usually fills Share's shelves to capacity and the food lasts until the spring, but now is the time when supplies begin to wane and food runs out.

"But hunger remains a problem in 2,700 households," Scott said. In 2010 8,634 people in the Tri-Cities used the food bank; more than 4,000 of them were children.

"So this is very important," Scott added. "Cities play a significant role in...reminding people these are our neighbours, they're children in our kids' schools that are going without food."