Starting a grocery gift card program: a step-by-step guide
Ready to make a difference in your community?
This website provides an evidence-based guide to help you create a more inclusive, dignified, and efficient approach to address food insecurity. Discover how a grocery gift card model can help your community, staff, and organization thrive in a variety of ways that go well beyond access to healthy food.
Why are we so sure? Because our research and the thousands of food-insecure households we serve affirm how our income-based response enhances everything from better diet quality to reduced stress to a stronger sense of resilience.
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Why create a grocery gift card program?
Our research has proven that the grocery gift card model is cost-effective, efficient, and much more dignified. Most importantly, food-insecure households continually tell us that they prefer to access this type of support compared to traditional food programs. Why? Some of the key advantages they highlight include:
Dignity
Households experience no stigma, shame, or judgment from others when using gift cards in the store.
Inclusion
Households can shop in the same stores as everyone else right in their own communities.
Resilience
Households can choose the foods that meet their unique health, cultural, and religious needs.
Flexibility
Households can spend as much or as little of the gift card as they need while shopping at the most convenient times and store locations.
What to expect in the guide
Throughout this guide, we’ve provided comprehensive detail to respond to the many questions we receive from diverse organizations who have access to varying levels of resources and skill sets.
Evidence
Links to key research and resources for readers who wish to discover more about food insecurity.
Design
The design phase of a grocery gift card program and the key infrastructure, philosophy, and skills needed for success.
Implementation
The implementation phase, including technical details on how to manage procurement, distribution, tracking, and inventory activities.
Tools
Downloadable tools that are easy to adapt to support inventory management, distribution, tracking, and evaluation.
If your work focuses on households struggling with food insecurity, then this guide is for you.
The guide provides insights and ideas for communities of all sizes, including cities, towns, and rural areas. Whether you’re an established organization looking to enhance current programming, or a new agency looking for an evidence-based way to alleviate food insecurity.
Charities
Nonprofits
Community groups
Health services
Social programs
Poverty reduction advocates
Are you in the Calgary area?
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We kindly ask you for a few details for three key reasons:
1. Evaluation: We want to understand our audience and measure our reach.
2. Communication: We will let you know if we perform major updates to the guide.
3. Collaboration: We may invite you to share feedback on how to improve the guide.
Rest assured, we will never overwhelm you with email and we will never share your data. Thank you again for your interest. Good luck with your program!
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About I Can for Kids
We used to feed food-insecure kids. Now we empower families to feed themselves.
Our approach represents an innovative shift in how we support food-insecure kids. Families tell us how our fresh approach improves their lives in many more ways than traditional, food-based responses.
I fell in love with everything about I Can for Kids!
When I reached out to see if they might offer some assistance in launching our own grocery gift card, I was mostly hoping they would’t be upset that I was going to steal their idea. What a shock to discover how thrilled they were to help, and they offered more time and resources than I ever would have imagined. Drumheller faces the same challenges as larger centres, but without the same infrastructure to alleviate the issue. The I Can for Kids grocery gift card model is so genius. It’s scalable, targeted, and evidence based. Which made it so perfect for us to adopt and adapt to our local context. We couldn’t have done it without I Can for Kids!
If your work focuses on households struggling with food insecurity, then this guide is for you.