Board & Staff
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
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Betty Gaertner
Chair
Directors
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Suellen Boyd
Talia Klein Leighton
Laurel Rothman
Carrie Goldstein Mazoff
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Founders
Rabbi Arthur Bielfeld
Dodo Heppner
Roger Hyman
EMERGENCY RESPONSE
As a national organization with deep grassroots, MAZON has had a birds-eye view of the local effects of this global pandemic.
While many larger charities were tangled in bureaucratic tape, MAZON could move quickly and nimbly to provide emergency funding, and responded dynamically to the diverse needs of many of our partners as they arose.
IN 2020 AND 2021:
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Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve moved over $1.4 MILLION, or over 500,000 meals, into emergency food aid, including food hamper programs, hot take-out dinners, frozen meal deliveries, and emergency grocery gift card programs – as much as the previous 4 years combined. Learn more about our 2020 Emergency Grants in the first 100 days of the pandemic, and about our whirlwind 36-day 2021 Omicron Campaign!
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We provide infrastructure to make long-term change. Over $168,000 of those grants provided capacity-building infrastructure meant to create long-term change, which will rescue, grow or harvest over 1.2 million lbs of fresh food over the next 5 years – and beyond. This includes soil, shovels and seeds at community gardens, providing safe places for people to build community outdoors as they learn to grow their own food or volunteer to grow food for others, and equipment like fridges, freezers, and vehicles that help organizations redirect mass quantities of edible food away from landfills to people in need.
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We’ve mobilized mass Jewish support for the issue of hunger through innovative campaigns, bringing in 1000+ new donors and re-activating 1100+ lapsed donors to our work feeding the hungry. Much of our expansion has come through word of mouth – donors telling their friends and loved ones about Mazon’s work and what it means to them.
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We’ve brought over 80 new partners into our network, bringing Jewish chesed to more communities than ever before - prioritizing remote, reserve and Northern communities where hunger hits hardest. Our work now impacts 200 programs a year in over 80 towns and cities across Canada. Learn more about Mazon’s partners across Canada here: Quebec, Ontario, the Maritimes, the Praries, British Colombia, and the northern Territories.
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We launched a pilot Advocacy Grant to research how the pandemic affects hunger, giving activists and advocates the support to make long-term structural change that will tackle hunger at the root. Through the pandemic, we supported the Coalition for Healthy School Food’s research on how school food programs adapted during school closures and restrictions, and the effects on the families that rely on these meals.
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We’ve reduced barriers to apply for funding. We’ve simplified our application significantly, so we can get all the information we need to make informed, careful granting decisions from an online form that takes most of our partners less than an hour. In addition, we have launched a multi-year no-application stream for our “Three-Year Champions”: trusted partners who we’ve supported successfully for many years. We hope to expand this stream in the future to many more grantees as we as we work towards trust-based philanthropy.
“I want to thank you all for the very quick response to our clients’ needs when Covid-19 hit.
At just the right time[…], you offered extra support.
You have no idea how important that was, or how thankful we were. It was so amazing and heart-warming to know your organization cared enough to check on us and to make sure you could help.
Thank you for that. You really do make a difference!”
- Gert Reyner (Executive Director, Leduc & District Food Bank)
