Morwell Neighbourhood House – People’s Kitchen
Project summary:
The Morwell Neighbourhood House’s (MNH) People’s Kitchen initiative has been doing incredible work for the most vulnerable in our community by providing nutritious meals to those in need.
In 2021, the Latrobe Health Assembly embarked on a joint research program with MNH to identify ways of expanding the service, its reach and, importantly, looking at ways of tackling food insecurity before the need even arises to seek the support of the People’s Kitchen.
Following this research, the Morwell Neighbourhood House partnered with the Latrobe Health Assembly to enable MNH to utilise their People’s Kitchen and related programs to implement an inclusive whole-person approach to addressing issues of food security, health and wellbeing based on the following five potential solutions:
- Enabling relevant community agencies to participate in Peoples Kitchen, Food Bank, and community garden activities (for implementation in 2022).
- Reaching out to communities in the Latrobe Valley who are marginalised in relation to access to resources and
- Framing the Food Bank and People’s Kitchen as a key
point of access for clients and volunteers to government, health, and community services.
- Offering access for People’s Kitchen participants to formal training, skills recognition, and vocational
- Investigating ways to engage secondary schools in addressing the question of food security and the
feasibility for senior secondary students to participate in aspects of the People’s Kitchen concept.
To date, key outcomes include:
- 700+ individual volunteers preparing frozen meals for
- 3000+ hours in volunteered
- $100,000+ in volunteered hours value (estimate).
- 8,000+ frozen meals
“I loved being a part of the program. It was fantastic to sit down at the start with [People’s Kitchen staff] and have a conversation around the program and why it is so important. This opened up conversation that I had with people throughout the day around food security and supporting community which was great.”
– People’s Kitchen Volunteer
Following the success of the program, an expansion of the project has been approved. The expansion of the program will see nutritionist-designed meal plans, the packaging of People’s Kitchen as a model that can be reproduced by other community groups, and micro grants to assist community groups to adapt and deliver the model themselves.
