Newark Neighbours ‘far outgrown’ its current space

Newark Neighbours, our local food bank and thrift store, has been proudly and successfully serving Niagara-on-the-Lake residents for 50 years, over 30 years in our current location on the grounds of the Riverbend Inn/Peller Estate property.

We are very grateful for our community’s consistent and incredible support over these many years. This support has been critical to our success as a not-for-profit organization, since we must rely solely on the generosity of our donors in order to deliver our programs to the NOTL community.  

Newark Neighbours has far outgrown its current building for both our thrift store and food bank. Our thrift store is receiving an increasing amount of high quality of donations on a regular basis. The space required to properly sort, organize and display the wide variety of clothing and household goods that we receive is becoming increasingly limited.

In addition, and perhaps more critically, our food bank storage capacity and ability to properly serve our food bank clients is becoming extremely limited. The number of registered clients visiting our food bank bi-monthly has increased over 100 per cent in the last two years. We are now feeding almost 150 individuals and families living in Niagara-on-the-Lake, each month. 

We are now reaching out to our community and key stakeholders in an appeal for ideas and suggestions on a potential new location and space — a space to better serve our growing needs. A requirement “wish list” has been developed including a minimum of 2000-plus square feet in space. The location must be central, have ground floor accessibility and be able to afford privacy for our food bank clients. We have a detailed requirements list that is available upon request but at a minimum, it must accommodate our retail space for the thrift store and have storage for managing our non-perishable food supply, a refrigerator and freezer, and suitable space for serving our growing number of food bank clients. 

We have been discussing our need for a new location with various stakeholders and organizations in the past several months. Unfortunately, to date, we have not been successful in identifying a solution. We are now publicly enlisting our community’s assistance to identify a new location, either a piece of land and/or an existing building that may be suitable for our requirements. Our timelines are flexible; however we would like to be able to re-locate within the next six to nine months. 

If you have a parcel of land that we could use to construct a building or have, or know of, an existing building that would be suitable for our needs, please contact us anytime at [email protected] or 905-468-3519. Our board members would be pleased to meet with you anytime to discuss any possibility.

We would be pleased to host anyone at our current location at 310 John Street East (on the Riverbend Inn property) so that you can see our current space and operations. 

Thank you in advance for your past and future support and commitment to our on-going success in offering our essential service to our Niagara-on-the-Lake community.