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A group of graduate students, who went viral on social media, are organizing a community walk to help raise funds for the Fort York Food Bank (FYFB), which recorded a 5,000 visit increase from Sept. 2024 to Sept. 2025.
“Meet the Walkers” is a group of friends who are using their social media presence (including 12.2k followers on Instagram) to host a community walk on Saturday, Oct. 25, encouraging people to demonstrate their support of the walk by donating to the FYFB. The Walkers are five friends: Sophia Franc, Hayden Chan, Michaela Purcell, Sebastian Karall and Katie Wang. The group went viral on social media for walking great distances in and around Toronto. One of their most viewed videos is of them walking the length of the TTC’s subway Line 2.
“We have so many eyes on us. We want to redirect those eyes to something that matters,” said Purcell.
The group says their walks opened their eyes to the severity of the city’s food insecurity problem.
“We walked through a lot of the downtown core. We see the crazy differences in wealth of the people walking by, and we want to help support the community,” said Purcell.
Julie LeJeune, the Executive Director for the FYFB, says the issue of food insecurity has “drastically changed.” LeJeune has been with the organization for 10 years and says the growth of the issue is “boggling” and caught them off guard a couple of years ago.
“I remember that spring [April 2022] going, ‘Wait a second, we ran out of food,’ which has never happened before,” she said.
Along with LeJeune, some experts, like Mustafa Koc, say that food insecurity is getting worse.
Koc is an emeritus professor at TMU and one of the founders and directors of the Centre for Studies in Food Security, FoodSecure Canada and the Canadian Association for Food Studies.
He says food insecurity is getting worse in Toronto, instead of disappearing.
“The problem is systemic. We live in a market economy where almost everything is a commodity that can be bought and sold,” he said. “Food and other essentials of life can only be accessed by those who have the financial resources to purchase them.”
The issue of food insecurity may become more noticeable to Torontonians around this time of year, but the holidays don’t necessarily impact the number of visitors at FYFB, LeJeune says.
“Food security is all year round, so someone didn’t just wake up on Monday [Thanksgiving] and realize that they can’t make ends meet this month, right?” she said. “I think the public wakes up to it [now] because they’re having this giant [Thanksgiving] meal.”
The Walkers have already raised $1,500 for the food bank, they said, but they’re hoping more people will donate during the walk.
Koc says that while working together with people on initiatives like the walk is important, the best long-term solutions to food insecurity require “government interventions to create decent jobs, incomes, public programs to support those in need, supporting small businesses and farmers.”
Saturday’s walk will start at Finch Station at 12:00 p.m. and end at the FYFB at 380 College St.
LeJeune says she loves that young people are engaging with their community in this way.
“I’m really impressed and encouraged to know that our future is in good hands with people like [The Walkers],” she said.
Janna Abbas is a Masters of Journalism student at TMU and a reporter for On The Record.
Otter.ai was used to generate some of the interview transcripts for this story.
