A message from our CEO

A message from Greg…

Hi everyone, it’s Greg Pattinson here the Chief Executive of Foodbank South Australia and Central Australia.

Firstly, I’d like to thank everybody out there for all your support. Over the last 12 months we’ve distributed 3.6 million kilograms of food which is more than we’ve ever done. That’s enough for about 7.2 million meals. We have also opened new outlets in remote and regional locations including Alice Springs and Ceduna.

We’ve relocated two of our older Food Hubs Bowden and Elizabeth to newer and much larger and brighter locations. Unfortunately, we’re having to do this in response to an increase in demand. Just as you’re aware of the increased cost of living many people are coming to Foodbank because of the rising prices that they’re seeing in their lives. With the rising fuel, rising food and a lot of people are coming to us who have never actually needed help from a food relief agency before.

Just as those people are having increased costs so is Foodbank, the food that we buy and the cost that we incur to transport the food everywhere is going up . We’re actually also facing those same challenges as to how we can either raise more money to get assistance or to use the limited resources we have to maximise the impact we have in the community.

We’re coming into winter now, we know winter is always very hard for people, we’ve got rising costs of electricity, we’ve got increased heating costs.  Unfortunately, right at this moment we’ve also got an increase in rental prices and interest due to the interest rate increases that banks are putting on many of the home borrowers in South Australia.

As a result of that we know the next six months is going to be pretty hard. As I have mentioned we’re already seeing more people coming into our Food Hubs to get help.

So if any of you out there can continue to help us we really do need your help the ways you can help us are:

  • Donating food
  • Donating money to our appeals
  • Advocating on our behalf – if you see a local MP please advocate that Foodbank does need the help of government
  • Spread the word – tell your friends and family about Foodbank and the important work that we do and try to elicit their help.

 

On behalf of everybody here at Foodbank we’d like to thank you for all the help you’ve given us in the past and hope that you can continue to do that in the future.