The Toronto Miracle food drive is returning for its second year to help collect donations for the city's food security organizations amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

This will be a one-day event drive that is striving to collect food donations from Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods.

"Last year in 2020, Toronto was having a lot of shocks because of COVID-19 and affecting people in different ways," said Kaspar Shahzada, a core member of Toronto Miracle. "One thing that was really alarming to everybody was how much food bank usage was going up."

The Toronto Miracle was inspired by similar events in other communities across Ontario, but this city-based one is the largest in scale, according to Shahzada.

The drive works by asking resident to leave non-perishable food itemd on their doorstep on Dec. 4 by 10:00 A.M. Volunteers collect the donations and redistribute them to established food security organizations across the city at a later time.

Organziations partnering with Toronto Miracle include the Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest, Second Harvest Canada, Scarborough Food Security Initiative and the Salvation Army.

In its second year, Toronto Miracle is hoping to raise 250,000 pounds of non-perishable food items to help address the city's increasing food insecurity.

Coupled with the strain of the pandemic, more Torontonians are visiting food banks in 2021, according to a recent report from the Daily Food Bank and North York Harvest.

The report states that there have been 1.5 million visits to city food banks, up 45 per cent from 2020.