At Food Banks Canada, we believe that food banks open doors: they allow for everyone to support one another through life’s challenges and pursue possibilities. We’re grateful to the people who’ve generously agreed to share their stories to show how this truth plays out in the lives of our families, friends, and neighbours.
Three decades ago at Christmastime, 12-year-old Jeret Holt was at home with his mother and two younger sisters in the small town of Black Diamond, just south of Calgary. Across a nearby football field, they spotted a large coach bus making its way down the road. It wasn’t something they saw every day, and definitely not a typical sight trundling down the side streets of their lower-income neighbourhood.
Holt watched as the bus stopped at certain houses, and folks dressed as Santa and his elves got out and delivered presents. And then the coach stopped at Holt’s house.
“I didn’t know it was the food bank, at the time,” he recalls. “I had no idea who it was. They came and just delivered gifts … And it truly felt like Santa visited us. It was something special for my sisters.”
The bus delivered Christmas presents donated to families via the local food bank, and it came to Holt’s home for the next couple of Christmases, adding a little extra joy to what was otherwise a rocky time for their family. Several years prior, his parents had divorced, kicking off years of bitter legal proceedings without child support. Even before the marriage had ended, his mother had to quit a good job for less stable roles so that she could raise the children. Money and food had become tight. But that year, along with the presents, the food bank also delivered a Christmas food hamper.
Holt has never forgotten this, despite how far he’s come.
Today, at 42, he is the founder, owner and operator of Calgary Cameraman, which provides cinematography and editing services to clients shooting in and around Calgary. Over the past 25 years, Holt has worked with news organizations from CBC to Al Jazeera and NHK; TV series from MTV Cribs to Property Brothers; and a long list of commercial, sports, and corporate clients from Subway to the NHL to WestJet. The company is still growing, currently expanding across Canada and into the US and UK.
But Holt is quick to acknowledge the community, family and friends who supported him along the way. Giving back has always been part of his process. He now mentors students who are interested in learning his trade. And when he gets the opportunity, he also speaks about his support for and appreciation of the food bank. “It showed that there was community,” he says. “And that at least somebody was there, caring.” This gratitude has lasted decades and followed Holt through some remarkable ups and downs.
Getting Support and Payinrg it Forward
Holt was born in Calgary and lived in nearby Turner Valley until he was two, when the family moved to adjacent Black Diamond. (The area has since amalgamated into Diamond Valley). His father was a commercial truck driver, and his mother had worked for the City of Calgary. “As individuals, they were good people,” Holt says, but he openly acknowledges that the relationship was very often tremulous and abusive.
When he was nine, his mother finally left, taking Holt and his sisters to a women’s shelter. The following years were stressful. He recalls his father became reclusive, with no child support forthcoming. His mother eventually started her own housecleaning business, with Holt taking care of his sisters after school. Holt struggled with ADHD and found schoolwork hard.
He wryly admits he was the ringleader of his school’s “bad kids,” to the point that he was expelled in Grade 8. Thanks to his mother’s support and perseverance, he managed to get into another school, where he earned a “most improved” award at his Grade-8 graduation; but by his mid-teens, high-school-aged Holt was reunited with his old friends, getting suspensions and discovering drugs.
It was during these years that Holt remembers the Food Bank’s bus with the presents, and the hampers that took some of the strain off the family during the holiday season.
The family hadn’t asked for this help. “People in the community would put my mom’s name in at the food bank, and then they would just show up with the hamper. It was a small community,” Holt says. “And my mom knew she needed help. So, she took it. I don’t think that there was any negative feeling. I think it was true relief.” Plus, he recalls, the hampers could be fun. They would sometimes get foods such as Jell-O pudding, which they never normally treated themselves to.
By the time Holt was in his mid-teens, he sometimes accompanied his mother on housecleaning jobs. One was a large property that became a regular client, where Holt helped out with lawn work and odd jobs.
As he worked, Holt couldn’t help but notice how …nice the place was. New cars. Some gleaming awards. So one day Holt asked the owner, a man named Doug, what he did for a living.
“I’m a cameraman,” Doug replied.
Holt had never heard of being a cameraman. But clearly it was a pretty nice gig. He decided he wanted to learn the ropes.
Doug began to mentor Holt on his new ambition, even letting him come along on shoots. But there was a new hurdle ahead. Holt needed to get into college for his chosen trade, but his grades were not great. He didn’t get accepted to SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology), his chosen school, on his first try. But Doug wrote a letter of support urging the school to look at his protégé’s ambition, not his grades, and the next year Holt was granted an interview.
It was during this process that one of the interviewers asked Holt if he knew who Doug was. That was when Holt learned that he’d been learning the ropes from Douglas Munro, an award-winning Canadian cinematographer with many credits to his name. He was learning from a real pro.
Holt got into SAIT on that try, leaving drugs behind. After graduating, he started his own business, Calgary Cameraman. The first years were tough, and he made mistakes, but he persevered and steadily built his reputation. He got a big boost after working with the TV show Property Brothers, where he earned credit with the production crew for assisting with the setup of particularly challenging shots.
Holt now works with international, world-renowned clients. His business continues to grow. He is also married, with two children of his own. “I was able to take all the good out of the bad,” he says. “I can pack that stuff away, break the chains for my kids.” He’s also worked hard on his relationships with his sisters, mom, and dad, who Holt was able to spend time with before he died of cancer in 2012.
Building a business from the ground isn’t for the faint of heart, and Holt has worked hard. But he also recalls all the people who helped him get to where he is today. A mentor who wrote letters and vouched for him despite bad grades. Family members who gave him a place to stay and support when he needed it – he recalls, for example, his uncle Bob and aunt Deb, who paid for his second SAIT application and let him stay in Toronto for a stint while he “cleaned up his act” before college. And community members who quietly signed the family up for gifts and food bank hampers all those years ago.
“As soon as you start focusing on how you can be of service, it’s amazing what that brings about, because it’s stuff you can’t predict,” he says. “It brings in so much.”
Holt hopes his story encourages others to consider what a difference their support for organizations such as the food bank can make – especially for food-insecure families with kids, who might treasure that reprieve long afterward, who will remember getting a hand when it was needed, and who will go on, as Holt has, to pay it forward.
“Kids are often the victims of circumstances they didn’t create,” Holt says. “So, when people are supporting the food bank, you need to think of the deeper purpose, or the greater good that it’s actually doing.”
