When Suman Roy walks into a United Nations meeting room, he carries a different kind of credential than most of the people around the table. He is not a diplomat. He is not a career civil servant. He is the founder of a community food security organization that started in a Scarborough backyard and now serves thousands of people every week.
That contrast, between the streets of a working-class Toronto neighborhood and the floors of multilateral institutions, is the reason global delegations have started paying attention to what Roy is doing in Canada.
A grassroots organization with a global framework
Feed Scarborough, which Roy founded in 2018, was the first food bank in Canada to formally align its programming with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The decision was not symbolic. Roy and his team rebuilt their operating model around SDG 2, the global commitment to eliminate hunger by 2030, and used the framework to shape everything from how they source food to how they train newcomers for jobs in the culinary sector.
The result is an organization that looks less like a traditional food bank and more like a small social enterprise. Feed Scarborough operates Canada’s first online door to door food bank for residents with reduced mobility. It runs FoodHall TO, a culinary incubator on Yonge Street where newcomers to Canada can learn to operate a food kiosk and build a business. It delivers culturally appropriate hot meals, runs job training programs, and partners with grocers and growers across the Greater Toronto Area to redirect food that would otherwise end up in landfills.
“Food insecurity is not a charity problem. It is a systems problem. If we treat it like a systems problem, we have to use systems tools. The Sustainable Development Goals are the most credible systems tool we have.”
From Scarborough to the United Nations
Suman Roy’s work has taken him from neighborhood church basements to the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization, where he has represented Canadian civil society on questions of food policy, poverty reduction, and community resilience. He has presented Feed Scarborough’s model to delegates from more than twenty countries at global summits in Bangkok, Istanbul, and beyond.
In each of those rooms, Roy makes the same argument. Food security cannot be solved by governments alone, and it cannot be solved by charity alone. It requires what he calls a third sector spine, meaning community-based organizations that have the trust to reach the most marginalized residents and the discipline to operate against international standards.
That argument has resonated. Feed Scarborough has been invited to mentor smaller organizations in Ottawa and other Canadian cities looking to replicate the model. International delegations have visited Scarborough to study the operation in person. Roy has been recognized with multiple global leadership awards, including CEO of the Year in the NGO category and Visionary of the Year.
Why Scarborough
Roy is direct about why he chose to build in Scarborough rather than in a more visible Toronto neighborhood. Scarborough has one of the highest concentrations of food-insecure households in the Greater Toronto Area, a large newcomer population, and historically thin coverage from established food banks based downtown.
“The greatest food bank need in Toronto is in Scarborough. But the greatest concentration of community-driven food innovation in Toronto is also in Scarborough. Those two facts are not in contradiction. They are cause and effect.”
It is a framing that has shaped how Roy talks about the broader Canadian story. The communities that need the most help, he argues, are also the communities most capable of generating the solutions, if they are given the resources, the framework, and the seat at the table.
A Canadian story with global reach
As 2026 marks the unofficial midpoint between the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals and their 2030 deadline, Roy has been increasingly vocal about the gap between Canada’s international commitments and what is happening in Canadian neighborhoods. He has called on the federal government to treat the 2030 Agenda as a domestic accountability tool, not just a foreign policy talking point, and has urged Canadian municipalities to adopt the SDG framework the way Feed Scarborough did.
For Roy, the journey from a Scarborough basement to the floor of the United Nations is not a personal achievement story. It is a proof of concept.
“This is a Canadian story, and it is a global story at the same time. The work happens on the ground in Scarborough. The lessons travel everywhere.”
Feed Scarborough now operates multiple locations across the east end of Toronto and continues to expand its programming. More information is available at feedscarborough.ca.