Website: Meal Exchange Canada
Website designed in 2017
Meal Exchange coordinates the student movement to transform food on Canada’s campuses. Students get involved through our national programs supporting campus kitchens, gardens and farms, food banks, food sovereignty and food procurement.
For us, it was a great opportunity to work with such a grass roots organization and to further their brand and identity across all platforms. It took us approximately 3 months and hundreds of design revisions to get a website that is functioning well but also is easy to make changes to in the future.
We also worked with their in-house graphic designer and improved their social media accounts as well as bridging any organizational gaps that existed (such as introducing Slack to the company for better communications)
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It can support a local economy or further the gap between rich and poor. It can promote health and dignity or contribute to malnourishment and stigma. Food can better the earth’s environment or exploit it. We believe that food can be real – healthy, just, sustainable, equitable—DELICIOUS. It can be all of this AND accessible to everyone.
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Canada’s Campuses spend over $300M on food every year--enough to impact the economy – for better or worse. Currently, they are supporting our broken food system, but they could be supporting businesses that are transforming the industry. Campuses are institutes of learning, improving, sharing. They have the potential to be places that inspire the world.
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Students ask questions about how things are done and imagine new ways that food can be a tool for change. Students hold an important role in the supply chain, and they are not afraid to use their consumer power to support sustainable purchases. By engaging their peers and building coordinated demand, they are showing us how campuses can inspire the world.
We also participated in their annual Trick or Eat campaign by providing active support on Slack channels and with designing the website. There was also work to be done with the in-house graphic designer in creating posters and guidelines that all the chapters in the rest of Canada could use.
Trick or Eat was an amazing opportunity to raise awareness about food security with people who have never heard about these issues before, and it brings students together.
Here are some images that were part of the refreshed website in 2017.
“🧡A Note From Meal Exchange’s Founder, Rahul Raj
In reflecting on the past 30 years, I want to share a few lessons that may be useful for you:
1. Starting is everything. At 17, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I had more food than I could eat, and others didn’t have enough. I wasn’t alone. So I started. I asked others to join in, and they did.
2. Persistence pays. My university had little desire to allow students to donate their meal plan money because it ate into the profit margin. While I tried to negotiate a solution with them, they weren’t having it. So we were persistent, and opted to do it anyway. That same philosophy was leveraged by many students we’ve collaborated with over the years who navigated the challenges of their campus food system to create change.
3. Be humble. While I had little idea what I was doing organizationally, I had faith I would figure it out. I wish I had taken a similar, humble approach to understanding the root causes of food insecurity earlier in my journey.
4. Faster alone, but further together. While the initial idea may have been mine, the impact was ours. If I were to start Meal Exchange again, I would form a team (including advisors) much sooner, welcome their input and insight, and leverage their talents to go further.
5. Diversify funding. We were heavily dependent on grants from foundations and the government, most of which focused on short-term impact, but we should have nurtured relationships with alumni to develop a diverse individual giving strategy that enabled us to build for the long-term.
I’m grateful to have collaborated with so many friends, volunteers, board members, and staff to mobilize and celebrate the tremendous power of students addressing food insecurity in Canada. I’m also grateful for the team’s awareness, support, and confidence to sunset the org when our contributions and thesis were no longer as meaningful or impactful.
It is with admiration and gratitude that we share this final post from Meal Exchange.
Thank you for the past and ongoing support! ”
Unfortunately, Meal Exchange Canada has sunset as an organization in 2023 as their mission was accomplished.
