Sayeda Fatima Food Bank

Project Overview

Sayeda Fatima Food Bank has served North Calgary for over a decade, providing over 900,000 meals and supporting more than 15,000 families with nutritious Halal food hampers and home deliveries. Guided by compassion and dignity, its mission is to build a hunger-free future by ensuring sustainable food access and building a caring, united community. Strategic volunteers like Muhammad Ali Kahloon and Mubashir Khokhar help strengthen its organizational development and continuity, so the food bank can grow its impact.

Project Summary

We designed and built a custom appointment management system for Sayeda Fatima Food Bank that is efficient, secure and easy to use for administrators and families alike. Families book their food pickups online, and the system checks each request against the food bank's rules before confirming it: every user is verified through Twilio, appointments are restricted by family, and at least 60 days must pass between bookings. Families can reschedule when plans change, and every confirmed booking syncs to Google Calendar with the participant's details, so staff see each day's pickups in one place. The work combined advanced booking logic, third-party integrations and performance tuning of the plugins behind the WordPress site, and our work for the food bank also included SEO, social media marketing and ads management.

About the food bank

Sayeda Fatima Food Bank describes itself as a Muslim food bank serving North Calgary, open to anyone in need regardless of background. Families collect their hampers at the Al-Madinah Calgary Islamic Assembly, in the Green Dome Mosque basement, and every pickup needs a reservation.

A hamper is supplemental support. It holds essential non-perishable food, with fresh produce, bread, hygiene or household items added when donations allow.

What they needed

The food bank runs on a few firm rules. A household may hold one hamper booking at a time, may collect three hampers in total, and must wait two months after a pickup before booking again.

Hamper size depends on how many people live in the household, and every member's ID is checked at pickup. So a booking had to capture the whole household, with ID, before anyone reached the pickup table, and a family had to understand the rules before choosing a time.

What we built, and why

We built the booking as a short path of three pages. The Book Reservation item in the menu, the I Need Support buttons and the Food Hampers card lead first to Read Carefully, which sets out the rules and the documents a family needs. Informed Consent comes next, explaining what personal information is collected, why, and how it is protected under Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act. Only then does the calendar open, because a form that asks for ID and income should never come before that explanation.

The calendar runs on Fluent Booking, a WordPress booking plugin, set up as a group event so several families can share one pickup time. Each time shows how many spots are left.

The form asks for the main contact's name, email, phone, gender, address and postal code, with Calgary and Alberta as the city and province. Choosing how many people will receive the hamper, from 1 to 12+, opens a Name, Date of Birth, Type of ID and ID Number set for every extra member, so the hamper is sized from the real household.

Each ID Number box takes the pattern of the ID type chosen, so a PR Card number is shaped XX-XXXX-XXXX, and the phone, postal code and date of birth fields format themselves as they are typed. Numbers in one shape are easier for staff to check against the ID a family brings. The form closes with the household's situation, chosen from 19 options such as Working part-time or Student, monthly income and expense lines, and a required upload of every ID picture. The button reads Request Reservation.

How it works for families

A family picks a date, then a time. Each pickup is a 60 minute slot at the mosque's address, and the booking card shows both.

If plans change, the family can reschedule or cancel, giving a reason either way. Both close 24 hours before pickup, when a message explains it is too late, so each day's pickup list is settled a day ahead.

Read Carefully also tells families that a hamper is only booked once a confirmation email arrives, and whom to call if it does not. At pickup they bring the same IDs they uploaded, and pictures of ID on a phone are accepted.

Where it stands today

The booking system is live on sayedafatimafoodbank.ca. When we checked on 29 September 2026, the calendar had pickup dates open in October 2026, each showing its spots left.

The site has 12 published pages. Its main pages date from December 2023. The Read Carefully and Informed Consent pages were added in February 2025, and the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy pages followed in April 2025.

The same site takes donations and volunteers. The Donate page offers e-Transfer first, then GoFundMe, then card payments through a Donorbox form, and the Volunteer page has its own sign-up form. The footer credits Nametech Canada Ltd.