A single mother of three, a father with his teenage son, an elderly couple, a group of unhoused people and many new immigrant families gather every Wednesday and Friday outside a building in Surrey to get their groceries for the week, at no cost.
Through the front gate, on any given day, you can see groups of seniors gathered for events, children running around during the summer and other people attending their scheduled counselling sessions inside the small office building.
Seeing the lot void of all these people is hard to imagine for anyone who's visited the site, but that may be exactly what's on the horizon, as the group that runs the space inches towards closure.
Meet Kingdom Acts Foundation
Kingdom Acts Foundation is a catch-all organization functioning out of the city’s Whalley neighbourhood for a large and growing BIPOC-majority community. It runs a food bank that offers household supplies and toys for children, and it also runs several programs for individuals and families, including summer camps for youth and dedicated evenings for single mothers and seniors.
“We saw a huge need that was really, really serious in Surrey. A lot of crimes, homelessness, drug addiction,” Godwin Ude, the founder of Kingdom Acts, told Peace Arch News while providing a tour of the space.
Kingdom Acts has been serving Whalley and the broader community for 14 years, operating out of the same building location for almost a decade.
Its food bank originated from a desire to offer different cultural foods – something that was important to Ude after people started coming to him looking for a diverse range of food that was not readily available at other food bank locations in 2016.
With Whalley's population being very culturally diverse, Ude said the service continues to become more popular each week.
“We realized that families actually want the food that they grew up with, especially new immigrants with kids from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Iran and Iraq and even from African countries. They might be suffering in silence by not talking about the desire for them to actually eat the kinds of foods that they’re used to,” Ude explained.
"They tell us ‘I saved $700 this month from coming here.’ For some people, this is the only grocery store they go to. We can’t turn them away because food is a fundamental right."
The food bank opens twice a week at 9 a.m. Many begin lining up outside the fence long before that, which shows the level of “desperate need” for the people Ude services, he said, as the demand often outweighs the supply.
The demand makes the possibility of the centre closing even more disheartening in this small area in Surrey.
“We can’t shut this down. The number of people needing food increases every week. Right now we can’t even keep up with the demand because the people that come here are telling everyone and we don’t have a gatekeeper asking for documents or ID. We don’t do that, that’s not fair," the founder explained.
“How can you tell someone who drove, who took the SkyTrain, who braved the weather, who lined up here for two hours — because some of them come in as early as 5 a.m. and they line up here. Some of them even come the night before. How can you tell them they don’t need food?”
Changing neighbourhood
The threat facing Kingdom Acts is two-fold: rising rent prices and development of the neighbourhood.
It has always been a pinch for the foundation to afford rent, but with inflation, it's only getting worse.
“We worked on this place. It was a junk and we took care of it,” Ude stressed, looking around one of the storage rooms on the morning of a busy distribution day.
The clients – many of whom are seniors and families with children – are lined up, perusing the selection of foods as they choose what they would like to take home. None of them know that their weekly routine of stopping by the centre may come to an end in the near future.
Ude fears the group will be pushed out by the pattern of development that’s changing the landscape of the area.
Whalley has seen significant change for several years now. Tenants now face the prospect of low-income housing being demolished for highrise development.
While residential and office towers abound, some feel community services haven’t been given as much emphasis. As an example, Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre does not have a swimming pool and will not have one, site plans for the updated centre to be constructed indicate.
"If housing is not taken care of, if the community centre is not established, where can parents take their kids here?" Ude said.
Kingdom Acts has stepped in to try to fill the void with camps aimed at residents of the Whalley area – a large portion of whom are low-income families that may not be able to afford the other camp services available.
The turning point
Initially, Ude was operating some services at a much smaller scale out of Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre. It was at first a place for youth to come together for pizza every Sunday, bounce around on a trampoline and enjoy the occasional BBQ during warm weather.
Shortly after that work began in Surrey, a crisis changed everything.
A 16-year-old boy who had been in foster care told Ude that his foster dad was trafficking drugs and roped him into it early on. The teen had gone to jail and done “many things” he wasn’t proud of, he said.
“He asked for help, but I said we couldn’t help him more than we did every weekend. He needed a place to come into at any time.
"That very discussion kept me awake during the night, thinking about how many people are like him. Young people who are living in these streets in Whalley who are in need of a place they can walk in and ask for help.”
It was not easy, but eventually Ude was able to create Kingdom Acts Foundation. He realized that while services to support people socioeconomically in the area are important, so are spaces to foster community.
Changing the lives of people proactively rather than in a reactive manner is Ude's goal.
This was why Kingdom Acts began running youth camps, with some specific youth-centred events for Black children. These were born out of the death of a 20-year-old Black man three years ago who Ude said was "groomed" by older individuals to get involved in crime.
"It’s time for the government to realize that it’s easier for a Black family to fall apart, for the children to get involved in crime. This is what we are trying to prevent; This is how we start," he stressed.
A community effort
None of it could have been possible without community involvement, however.
“We had people ready to work. That’s the thing, if you do something good, you’ll be shocked at how many people want to be a part of it. Some of these street people are skilful and they helped. We did the drywall, the painting, the carpentry and we fixed this place,” he recalled.
“Women, children, the unhoused, everybody worked.”
That same community involvement still powers Kingdom Acts, as all its volunteers are clients who stepped up to help. The handful of people who stepped up years ago created the space that now benefits thousands.
"One day, they just saw a group and started getting everyone together to line up and started handing out numbers. We never asked them to do that," Ude said, smiling at the community that naturally formed in the small lot.
One of those volunteers is Fawzi, a father of two daughters who came to Canada as a refugee from Syria, now in Surrey struggling to provide for his family. Fawzi began using the food bank for his family four years ago and is now the No. 1 volunteer running the space on pickup days, Ude shared proudly.
"Before, it was 45 people, then after COVID, it's more than 100. Before, it was only immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, the Middle East, but now look, it's everyone, even those born in Canada," said Fawzi, who did not want his surname published.
Another client, Od Okonkw, a mother, says many individuals, including herself, save a lot of money by using the food bank and its other services.
"There’s a lot of people who benefit from it because it’s open. You can just walk in and get food," Okonkw said.
When Ude learned from some students, namely international ones, that they were unable to access the food bank during its morning weekday times due to attending classes, the founder began allowing the students to pickup food items on Sunday mornings instead.
Lilia Roxas, a grandmother who has been using Kingdom Acts's food bank since the beginning and began helping with food distribution four years ago, says that everyone, including herself, "goes home happy."
"This is our community. We do take some but we also want to give back," Fawzi shared.
While many people come from other areas of the Lower Mainland to access the different offerings of Kingdom Acts, the large proportion of people are local to the Whalley area. This shows how dire the need is in the area and why closing is not an option, Ude said.
“You’re talking about creating a barrier in Whalley, which is the centre of homelessness. What kind of a barrier am I going to create here?
"But we don't know if we'll be here next year, no one is saying 'We're supporting this.'"
Funding uncertain
It wasn't until 2020, when the pandemic hit, that Ude was able to receive any funding at all.
"We had absolutely no support, no sponsor, no funding, nothing. We didn’t know how to get it, it was just from my own pocket," the founder shared.
Ude began a deal with COBS Bread to pick up food items that the store location did not sell by the end of the night. He did that two nights a week, driving out to Ladner, then handing out the product the next day at his Surrey location.
A similar deal was made between Kingdom Acts and Save-on-Foods in 2021 to receive produce that the company did not deem cosmetically good enough to sell but was still safe to consume. Ude began running the service this way, picking up items that corporations could not sell but that were still good enough and healthy to eat.
In 2021, when the federal government did a call-out for organizations who could distribute frozen food items to those in need, Ude knew the opportunity would help the local community, but the organization did not own a freezer.
With a price tag of $6,000 for one large enough, Ude knew the cost was too high for him alone, so he went directly to the community to ask for donations.
"That’s when we realized that the people we serve are desperate people. They can’t even spare five dollars because they don’t have it, so trying to raise money from the community got us $150 for a $6,000 freezer."
Kingdom Acts could not purchase a freezer but was able to afford renting one for a week so the organization could still receive the food items.
Some funding comes through the federal government, such as 50 per cent for the van the organization uses to drive around and pick up products. However, Ude says the funds are unreliable and change year-to-year, requiring many costs to be covered still out of pocket.
Currently, yearly expenses total to nearly $100,000 for Kingdom Acts Foundation to stay afloat.
"We don’t know if we’re going to get $10,000 or $1,000 for the next year, so that’s the state we’re in right now. We are in the state where there is no commitment from the city, no commitment from the province, no commitment from any type of funding."
Part of the struggle, Ude adds, is that Kingdom Acts is not the only food bank in Surrey, so often when he applies for funding or appeals for support, he is met with the response that government and corporation funding already goes towards a food bank.
However, many people who rely on Kingdom Acts do not visit other food banks, including many who commute to the Whalley location from different municipalities, the director shared, because of their specific cultural food needs.
This is why Ude says he will not give up. With donations made through the Kingdom Acts Foundation website, in-person or new grants that may arise, he hopes the centre will stay.
