As migrant farmworkers prepare to return to Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Farmworker Hub NOTL hopes to welcome them with wellness bags of everyday essentials, offering some relief at the start of the season after a challenging year marked by Hurricane Melissa.
The hub is now calling on the NOTL community to help make that possible.
It launched the wellness bag initiative last year, after receiving an influx of donated hygiene items and realizing they could be assembled into something meaningful.
“(It) kind of clicked,” said Brittney Kranz, lead co-ordinator of the Farmworker Hub NOTL. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have these wellness bags at the farms when the workers come back?”
For ease, the hub has created an Amazon wishlist at amazon.ca/hz/wishlist/ls/3GJFNZ4OP9OFB. Items ordered are shipped directly to Kranz’s home, then brought to the hub and packed by volunteers.
Donations can also be dropped off at 1570 Niagara Stone Rd. every Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., or arranged outside those hours by calling or texting 905-483-9717.
The hub also accepts unopened, non-expired items people may already have at home and invites short notes of welcome or encouragement to include in the bags.
The goal, Kranz said, is to remove one immediate burden from workers as they arrive.
The hub hopes to place wellness bags directly in workers’ rooms, stocked with everyday essentials such as soap, toothpaste and razors — items workers typically buy immediately after arriving in Canada.
“So instead of having to worry about putting money out for those items, we’d like them to just be able to come here and get settled in and not have to worry about that,” she said.
“It also kind of welcomes them,” she added. “Your hub family is here and thinking of you.”
Kranz said the need is greater this year: “We did not receive the items that we had the previous year.”
The end of 2025 was also devastating for workers from Jamaica, she said, who continue to feel the impacts of Hurricane Melissa, the category 5 hurricane that struck the island in late October.
Some remain without electricity, with downed hydro poles in their communities, and are dealing with widespread damage to their farms and livestock.
“Everyone in Niagara-on-the-Lake, they’ve been asking, ‘How are the workers, how are they doing?’” she said. “A lot of the men I talked to lost their chickens, and cows, and their farms, and their crops — that they do rely on.”
When workers returned home, time normally spent resting and reconnecting with family was instead consumed by damage and disruption, Kranz said.
“You’re not spending that quality time with your family — you’re literally rebuilding your house,” she said. “Now, these men are going to have to come back to work here, because that’s their job and they need to make money for their families.”
Kranz said the response from the community has been encouraging.
By the morning after the request was posted, donated items were already waiting outside her home: “It’s like, it’s really awesome.”
But the timing has made fundraising more difficult, she added.
“We’re coming off of the holidays and then, also, there are other organizations asking for the same things for different efforts,” she said.
“We have received 20 tubes of toothpaste, which is amazing, but at the same time, we need to keep pushing because we have hundreds of men that are coming back that we’re looking to support.”
Kranz said every item matters.
“If we can get 100 people to donate one tube of toothpaste, that’s 100 tubes,” she said.
She shared the initiative on her Facebook account, asking residents to help spread the word.
“We just need to keep the push going.”
The hub encourages any businesses interested in sponsoring wellness bags to contact the hub at the same number provided above.
