Rebranded Geelong Foodshare tackles food insecurity across the region

FOR Geelong Foodshare, creating social change is more than just a tagline.

It’s an ethos that sits at the very core of everything the food relief centre does, from its partnerships with frontline charities across the region to the almost 200 volunteers that help make it all happen.

The organisation, which has been operating in the community for almost 35 years, rebranded in November from Geelong Food Relief to Geelong Foodshare, a name chief executive officer Andrew Schauble said better reflects the nature of its work and the impact it strives for.

The organisation collects, rescues and receives food donations from a variety of local businesses each week, enabling it to distribute more than 100 tonnes of food to those in need each month.

This food is carefully sorted at its Morgan Street site in North Geelong before it is distributed through a network of more than 65 agencies across the Greater Geelong and Surf Coast region, from vital community access points like Feed Me Bellarine and The Outpost, to emerging programs such as Pass the Snacks.

It’s a process that allows the organisation to tailor the items it supplies to the specific needs of each of these agencies, in turn helping these agencies to enhance their own offering.

In this way, the Foodshare supports an estimated 20,000 people every week and helps to ensure other crucial community programs can continue to operate.

Geelong Foodshare also operates two of its own social supermarkets – reminiscent of your local IGA – with a wide selection of items on offer.

What the organisation can’t source through rescue or donation, it buys to ensure community members can access the essentials they need.

“Food relief is often just seen as dropping food to people. There’s an absolute need for that, but there’s also, as we keep working through to try and support food security and food system, [the need to] keep working along the spectrum,” Mr Schauble said.

“We have groups that come in here and run cooking classes, we’ve got a kitchen, we have obviously a lot of school programs that come through here, we have supported workers.”

But funding challenges remain for the organisation and it, like many other frontline services, is seeing both the need for support continue to grow across the region and the demographics of those seeking support widen, with an increasing number of dual income families now finding it hard to make ends meet.

“We know from our agencies, they’re just getting more and more demand and they’re also reporting that a lot of the complexity around people’s challenges are increasing,” Schauble said.

“Food is that thing that unite everyone. It’s a lot about that food share, it’s a lot about sitting down together, having a meal.

“People will come in for the food because they have a direct need of food, but while they’re there, they can then talk about other issues that are happening in their life.”

Looking ahead, a key focus for Geelong Foodshare through 2025 will be expanding its partnerships, like those it has with organisations like the Wathuarong Aboriginal Co-operative and Cultura.

Many of these partnerships provide an avenue to explore and implement new programs within the community capable of creating meaningful change.

“We want to see that we’re all heading in the direction of being able to create greater, broader social change,” Schauble said.

For more information, head to geelongfoodshare.org