The Matriarch’s Collective are building community to fight food insecurity

Every Saturday, the Matriarch’s Collective spends the full day preparing meals for hungry individuals and families around Regina. Sometimes two or three different kitchens, located in community churches or the Regina Food Bank, are simultaneously at work preparing food.

After the hours of preparing food, for well over 100 individuals, meal service is swift. The food can disappear in minutes.

“We can’t keep up with the food output. We normally do our meal service from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Sometimes it’s gone within 15 minutes. That’s how fast it goes,” said Kelsey Aitcheson, co-founder of the Matriarch’s Collective.

“The need is one-hundred percent out there.”

The Matriarch’s Collective is a Regina-based, volunteer-run mutual aid group founded in 2023 that fights food insecurity by preparing and distributing meals.

It started after an encampment at city hall in Regina was shut down, exposing a service gap for individuals looking for a proper meal on weekends. Aitcheson and co-founder Sarah Mercer began cooking at local churches on one or two Saturdays per month.

From the start, they were cooking enough to feed 50-60 people, but as the demand kept growing, they responding by offering their meals weekly.

“It has definitely gotten bigger than we could have ever imagined,” said Aitcheson.

“We don’t put a cap on how much people take. They know what they need, we don’t. A lot of people are taking food to feed their family, their friends, their neighbours.”

As a mutual aid grassroots organization, the Matriarch’s Collective does not deal with money. In order to provide meals to individuals, they receive food donations and gift cards that can be used to purchase food. They also have had several kitchen spaces donated for their use, including Eastside United Church, Heritage United Church, and the Regina Food Bank.

“(Not dealign with money) has been by design. We don’t want to follow a non-profit model, we don’t want to be gathering data on people,” said Aitcheson.

“The majority of the people we’re seeing are Indigenous and we’ve already been data’d to death. That’s part of our serving people with dignity – we don’t want to see you as a number, we want to see you as a human being.”

This human-focused approach has garnered the Matriarch’s Collective a nomination for the 2026 Regina YWCA Women of Distinction Awards in the Community Champion category. The award ceremony takes place on March 28.

“It’s been really weird for us, to be honest. We’re very thankful and understand the privilege of being nominated and recognized, but it does feel weird because we’re not gala people. We just want to give back to the community,” said Aitcheson.

The Matriarch’s Collective has four co-leads: Sarah Mercer, Josée O’Blenis, Laura Whiteman, and Aitcheson. The principles that earned them the YWCA award nomination was something established from the moment the Matriarch’s Collective began.

“We were four mothers who came together, who want to centre on women, children, and those who are most vulnerable in the community,” said Aitcheson.

“My mom told me, it’s a sacred responsibility to be a matriarch in your community. And as much as we feed people, we’ve also worked hard at building community amongst our volunteers.”

Aitcheson said their work wouldn’t be possible without help from the rotation of committed volunteers – sometimes of which 20 at a time come out on Saturdays. They have consistently worked with other community organizations such as the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan’s Métis Mobile unit, the Stargivers Initiative, and the Muslim Students Association out of Campbell Collegiate.

“We consider ourselves a jump-off point for volunteers. We want to introduce you to what it means to serve your community, and be in a community,” said Aitcheson.

In addition to providing meals, the Matriarch’s Collective also coordinates drives for clothing, hygiene products, and has even done a stuffed animal drive for children. And, as frontline workers, they have educated themselves and their crew in de-escalation training, food safety, as well as narcan and naloxone training.

The need to continue this work is evident, said Aitcheson. And from the community environment the Matriarch’s Collective has created, the desire from the community is evidently there as well.

“We’ve seen the numbers of people that require support at least triple in these past three years,” said Aitcheson.

“Ideally, we would love to expand to more than just one day a week. We’ve had volunteers tell us that if they could do this every single day, they would.”

Those interested in volunteering can contact the Matriarch’s Collective on their Instagram or Facebook pages: @thematriarchscollective