NOTICEBOARD

noticeboard Feeding mouths and building communities

When COVID hit two years ago, many people lost their incomes and suddenly found themselves homeless. In response, StreetSmart Australia designed an initiative to help.

SmartMeals was launched in March 2020 as a dual impact initiative in response to the COVID19 crisis. Food insecurity was rising rapidly as lockdowns caused widespread financial instability and left rough sleepers housed in accommodation without cooking facilities.

It was also increasingly evident that many restaurants were fast going out of business and unable to support their staff, some of whom were not entitled to government programs such as JobKeeper and JobSeeker.

SmartMeals was launched as a way of pairing these two community cohorts — providing income and job security for the hospitality sector workers while responding rapidly to the increased need within vulnerable communities for food relief and assistance.

SmartMeals is one of a plethora of programs that exist under the umbrella StreetSmart Australia — an organisation set up in 2003 to take direct action against homelessness. “We believe no one should be without a safe and secure place to call home,” says its mission statement. StreetSmart raises funds, then seeks out and supports smaller grassroots organisations performing vital work in local communities.

In 2021, the SmartMeals program was relaunched with a focus on partnering with food-based social enterprises to ensure disadvantaged people had the opportunity to upskill and deliver ready-made meals to people experiencing food insecurity. This new chapter of SmartMeals enabled its social enterprise partners to continue to provide vital job training and pathway programs for vulnerable people in a difficult jobs market.

While the SmartMeals program was initially an emergency response to the COVID crisis, it continued to be vital to many disadvantaged people over a 20month period. “Every Wednesday, we delivered 80-100 hot meals for Deadly Connections to distribute in Redfern and Waterloo,” says Ravi Prasad of Parliament on King in Newtown. “There are outcomes of this program on multiple levels, outside of just the number of meals and number of employed people, there’s beautiful community building also.” Unfortunately, due to expended funding reserves, the SmartMeals program closed on 17 December last year. When asked by Inner Sydney Voice what the current situation looked like for SmartMeals, Adam Robinson, founder of StreetSmart Australia, said: “We did close down the SmartMeals program over the past two months as we ran out of funds. During December and January we have been fundraising with the aim of continuing the program.”

Happily, the fundraising was a success and the SmartMeals team are looking to restart the program in April. Once again, the funds will be directed to social enterprise businesses to make community meals for their local areas. “We will continue this model as it was highly impactful in 2021,” said Robinson. “We will be looking to support a number of hospitality businesses across all states and we do have a couple of good partners in Sydney, including Darcy Street and Plate it Forward.”

n If you would like to support the SmartMeals program, click or tap here.

Without these meals I would have nothing to eat for lunch.

When you’re down and out like this, it’s tough. This food has kept me afloat during this particularly rough patch in my life. The meals are so good. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be able to rely on them each day. This food is a blessing. I don’t know what I’d do without it.