“When I first started people would use the food bank for a couple years, then move on to something else. Now I’ve been seeing people come in regularly for the last five or six years,” he said.
Kay, 45, believes over the course of his time in the community, poverty has gotten “deeper and wider” penetrating most individual lifestyles and spreading through to many families.
Since 1994, he’s been at the helm of the food bank, providing people with a service that goes beyond food distribution and into hunger relief.
Understanding and relating to life under the poverty line, Kay’s childhood in Montreal was a time when his family relied on government money to pay the rent and feed him and his little sister.
“When I was growing up the idea was if you were poor you get welfare,” he said.
After studying and obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Concordia University in 1992, Kay traveled to Africa a few years later, where he explored the culture and learned about the extreme poverty faced by the African people.
This experience taught him compassion, which he brought back to Canada and has continued to use throughout his career as an executive director, drawing parallels between other people’s situations and his own.
“Some of the issues and things I’ve learned about the food bank, especially how people are resilient and creative, I can put to good use because they’re lessons I’ve already learned,” he said.
Kay’s life went full circle from surviving poverty as a child to a young man venturing out into the world to see it firsthand, then committing his career to those less fortunate in the city he grew up.
Among those closest to him at the food bank is Lin Scott and Glenn Hawley. These two volunteers dedicate their free time giving back to the community and enjoy working under Kay’s leadership.
“In the position that he’s in being an executive director, he’s absolutely the most patient and generous person,” Scott said.
Hawley agrees with this and jokes about the many years they’ve spent together working at the food bank.
“I’ve known Mike for over 15 years, that’s a very long time.”
And even though Scott has only been volunteering over the last year, she’s really been able to learn from Kay on the job and create a lasting friendship.
“I’m obviously perfectly at ease with him, I was very shy when I first started, but he helped tremendously,” she said.
Scott and Hawley believe Kay has a hands-on approach where he prefers to be in their midst, lifting boxes or talking to clients, when he’s not on the phone or computer dealing with donors or donations.
Food bank clients also notice his presence because his work space is located next to the entrance. Kay sees this as a great way to meet and interact with members of the community, who may be looking for something more than just food. But he adds this often makes him a target for frustrated clients not getting a certain desired item.
“Everybody likes peanut butter and for a certain type of person, say a 45-year-old single guy with no cooking skills, who I can empathize with, peanut butter is a good thing.”
After being approached many times and asked the same question: ‘why am I not getting any peanut butter?’ Kay explains the reason, courteously giving the same reply each time.
“We don’t get enough, so we save it for kids to send to school,” he said. “Ninety-nine times out of one hundred the person will understand and agree that children are more deserving.”
According to Hawley, this is a perfect example of how effective Kay is as a communicator and goes to show why he’s so respected by everyone at the food depot.
“He’s been doing this for quite sometime. He doesn’t have to look up any answer to most of the questions you ask him. He knows right away. That shows expertise,” he said.
At the end of April 2009, Kay will be leaving his post as executive director at the NDG Food Depot. A place where he’s always felt a sense of belonging.
“I’ve got to relax and clear out my head and process the last 15 years,” he said.
With all the changes that have taken place in NDG during his career at the food bank, Kay feels the need to do something different, possibly even returning to Africa to reconnect with the place that influenced his work over 20 years ago.
“The biggest thing for me is trying to put a one or two sentence summation of my time here,” he said. “I came out of this experience having gotten a whole lot more than I put in.”
