Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), CÉGEP de l’Outaouais (CO) and CÉGEP Heritage College (CHC) joined forces in 2023–2024 to improve the operation and offering of on-campus community fridges for students experiencing food insecurity. Community fridges allow people from these institutions to take or donate food. The joint project to optimize the community fridges made it possible to purchase materials and equipment, prepare and print promotional materials, create guides and operation sheets, and more.

At the start of the 2022 fall term, UQO officially announced that it would be partnering with the Regroupement des cuisines collectives de Gatineau (RCCG) to create the nourishing campus project. This multi-faceted partnership offers six food and education services.

One of these services is to supply UQO’s community fridges with unsold foods from grocery stores. The RCCG collects items from two grocery stores twice a day, Monday to Sunday. These two stores alone feed the student community while keeping nearly 120 tons of organic matter out of landfills.

The objective is to increase the supply of food in the community fridge in the Alexandre-Taché pavilion and to include the CEGEPs so they can also offer unsold grocery store items to their students.

To reach this goal, the project first plans to develop partnerships with the owners of grocery stores located near the PESO institutions and organize a short route to supply the community fridges with unsold items. Second, the project would set up a community fridge at CHC (since there is already one at UQO and CO).

The project to supply community fridges at PESO member institutions is developing a food security tool for the student community while also reducing food waste and thus greenhouse gas emissions.