Harvest Hands grows

An abundance of surplus food delivered to Ontario charities

The creators of Harvest Hands, a successful food recovery centre in St. Thomas, Ont., are about to take their model to 25 other cities in Canada (HarvestHands.ca).

“There’s no limit to the supply of surplus food and no limit to the demand for it,” says Jim Collins, director of Harvest Hands, a nonprofit initiative that collects surplus food and delivers it to a growing number of charities across Ontario.

Collins, a businessman and pastor of Harvest Outreach International Church in St. Thomas, began the centre in 2020 with his wife Jacintha, a copastor, to provide food for church members. Harvest Hands now has seven trucks on the road daily. Last year a team of 138 volunteers repackaged and delivered over $7 million worth of food to 215 food banks, shelters and other charities. The centre provides food “for over 65,000 meals per month,” says Collins.

Because the program is run entirely by volunteers, every dollar donated to cover the fuel and operating costs “provides the value of three meals,” says Collins.

“Without Harvest Hands we’d be sunk,” says Katherine Marsland, kitchen co-ordinator for Teen Challenge London, a Christian in-residence drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for men. Marsland says she was finding it hard to feed 75 men on donations. Now, with Harvest Hands food deliveries, Marsland says, “God brings abundance.”

She considers the quantity and quality of the food deliveries almost a miracle. “I’m jumping up and down every time the truck comes. I say, ‘We get to have that?’ I know how much that food costs.”

The Harvest Hands team is “fabulous to us,” says Karen McDade, manager of public relations and administration of the St. Thomas Elgin Food Bank, who served 6,000 new families in 2023. “They don’t give boxes of produce – they give whole skids.”

Harvest Hands shares the gospel as well as supplies food, says Collins. Church volunteers often pray with clients, he says, adding they have found clients to be “really open to the gospel” because of the practical help.

Collins says the project has brought him to a new level of faith in “God as the Giver. At first we had more demand than food.” God stretched his faith by giving him “a strong urging in my spirit” to let clients “take as much food as they wanted” from the delivery van. “From that day on we were never short of food.” In response to requests Collins has developed a plan to extend the program to 25 other large Canadian cities.

Photo: Harvest Hands’ team of over 130 volunteers in St. Thomas, Ont., collects surplus food and delivers it to charities across Ontario; the initiative was started in 2020 by Jim and Jacintha Collins. HARVEST HANDS