Gail Nyberg saw the recession coming long before most economists told us it had arrived. She could tell the economy was in bad shape by the ever-growing numbers of people coming through the doors at food banks.
"When it [the recession] finally hit in the fall and then coming into January [of 2009], everybody seemed to be reeling that we were in a recession. And those of us in the food bank business were saying, 'So what they hell took you so long?' " says Ms. Nyberg, executive director of the Daily Bread Food Bank, a non-profit organization in Toronto that distributes food to 171 agencies across Ontario.
Yet in what could have been a more difficult time for food banks, the amount of donations to Daily Bread increased slightly in 2009. That, she says, is a remarkable fact considering so many people who usually give to food banks lost jobs during the year, or were hit hard enough by the recession to watch their pocketbooks.
"I lost my faith in economists coming through this," Ms. Nyberg says, "but my faith in humankind was restored."
