Saanich student leads 12 Greater Victoria, Vancouver farms in food recovery
Published 5:30 am Monday, March 2, 2026
A youth-led initiative to gather food that would otherwise be wasted is predictably growing beyond its Saanich seeding.
Apollin Lu, executive director, started the Food Recovery Alliance during her Grade 9 year at St. Michaels University School. Lu grew up around farms, including watching her dad at work for a decade. She saw how hard farmers work, and how dismayed they are with the thousands of pounds of produce heading to waste.
“I quickly realized this is a lot of work,” Lu said, of the early working on farms and markets to gather a team and suppliers.
The Victoria Food Alliance was officially incorporated under the BC Societies Act Feb. 24, 2025 as the West Coast Food Recovery Alliance Foundation.
Now in Grade 11, she spent two years building community connections – quickly tallying 7,272 pounds of produce valued at $25,210 – expanding last year to incorporate farming workshops, designed to entice younger audiences.
“This year we really started to get a lot of youth interest in our organization, which I think will help us sustain long term,” Lu said.
The organization primarily partners with the Mustard Seed for distribution.
The Victoria food bank boasts a food security distribution centre that rescues and receives more than 10,000 pounds of food each weekday from 30-plus local grocery stores and donors distributing it through some 60 local social service agencies – impacting about 70,000 food insecure individuals.
The teen-led Food Recovery Alliance continues to grow, working with a dozen local farms that donate frequently, primarily in Greater Victoria plus two in Greater Vancouver.
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The leadership team continues to look at other longterm options, piloting a partnership with Amazon on the Lower Mainland and creating an app for food donation. They already created one for invoicing, so farmers can get an immediate tax receipt, streamlining that process.
“It’s hard for a lot of farmers to trust someone they don’t know to come on their farm. We really want to partner with Rise Up and other organizations, to spread the word and build legitimacy,” Lu said.
That would expand capacity of the Vancouver branch, building a bigger network there.
They most recently started a project to teach how to prepare food, and donated those meals to the Victoria Women’s Transition House.
Next up is building on the website, foodrecoveryalliance.org, as it’s often the first point of exposure.
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Email: christine.vanreeuwyk@blackpress.ca