Tim Talks: Recent Episodes
Tim Keating
Welcome to Tim talks with Tim and Jill. Tim and I are two educators in the city of Hamilton who have this unique position of working with youth and adults who have left the traditional school setting for various reasons and are returning to school after a gap in their educational continuum. The goal of these podcast are to create educational lessons that will provide local information that may not only help improve their personal situations but also make connections to living and social resources within the city.
The low income budgeting project focusing on food security is a student based assignment giving students some information about managing a food budget.
Special Thanks to out urban artist Tevin for providing the original artwork for the series.
For this podcast about food security we are going to look at living on a food budget of $23 dollars a week. This number came about by taking the Ontario Works monthly supplement and working on the assumption that we would have $100 a month for food allowance. This worked out to $23 dollars a week. Attached is the grocery list Tim used for the week experiment. As well, there is an attachment for doing your own monthly budget.
Student!! - You can talk to Jill or Tim for the assignment. I've attached an excel spreadsheet where we want you to put in the amounts you spend on various items in a month. (rent, food, transportation, etc) This will give you an understanding of where you money goes and what we can do to maximise it. There are two columns you need to fill out. The first is the "projected" expense. This column you fill out at the beginning of the month and we want you to guess how much you think you will spend on the listed items. Some you will know for sure like rent. But others you will have to guess how much you spend. Then for a week, you will track everything you spend (yes even your Timmy's coffee's) so we can figure out how much a month you spend on these items. This will allow us to look at our personal budgets and figure out if there are areas where we can save some money.
Remember, always you can come to Jill or Tim for help or further explanations of what we are expecting. Good luck.
Scenario-1-Food-Budget ow-.xltx-11
For this podcast we recruited a friend and co-worker Jen, who took the challenge to the next scenario. She used the same $23 a week budget as scenario 1 but also incorporated the use of the local food bank. How does this addition effect her weekly food plan? What did she find good or bad about this scenario? Listen and learn.
Students. We've attached the links to the local food banks. There are many services that help with basic food and hygiene items in the Hamilton area. They all have various limits as to what you can take and how often you can go. But you can go to many of them throughout the month.
Your assignment
Food-Bank-Worksheeet
Link to Food Banks in the Hamilton Area
https://www.hnhbhealthline.ca/listServicesDetailed.aspx?id=10572®ion=Hamilton
Also, if you go back to Scenario 1 Podcast and look at your budget sheet. Is there any money that can be saved by using the Scenario 2 food budget?
This scenario involves Jill using a $100.00 budget to purchase food for a one month period, using healthy and low cost food items. The menu, grocery items and recipes are included.
Food-Security-Assignment-Menu-and-Grocery-List-for-One-Month