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End of year update with Greg.
Transcript
2022 has been a huge year for Foodbank in South Australia as we’ve continued to feed 135,000 South Australian and Central Australians every month and along the way, we’ve been tackling some severe challenges.
At the start of the year, we had the flooding in northern South Australia which restricted the essential food supply to our Alice Springs operations. Like a lot of other businesses, we’re also managing our way through the COVID pandemic and ensuring that our operations continue to stay open so that we continue to supply food to people in need.
On a positive note, we achieved some really great things during the year. We commenced our School Breakfast Program in Alice Springs to provide food to local schools and we’re hoping that more join up in 2023.
Our Ceduna Food Hub which was established at the start of the year, started to gain momentum and we’re now seeing a significant increase in the number of people seeking food assistance from that site. We achieved a milestone when we moved our Elizabeth Food Hub to Davoren Park which allowed us to operate in a much larger space in an old Foodland supermarket, allowing our clients to really shop in a good environment. We’ve now started to share that space with another very good charity in Treasure Boxes.
During the year we had the election of the new state government, and we are continuing to talk to them to try to convince them to increase funding to Foodbank South Australia. To support our efforts to tackle food relief in South Australia. We ask all the Foodbank supporters to speak to your local MPs about the work that Foodbank does in your community and to advocate to your MP that we should be getting more support.
We had some extremely successful events during the year, the Women of Influence lunch earlier in the year, the Port Adelaide Game with the support of MG cars. We did an RAA food drive, and just recently the ABC Food drive, just to name a few.
We’re very excited next year to be starting a new partnership with Variety to deliver School Lunch Programs for the next three years to at least 100 schools in the state particularly in regional or remote areas and we hope that the education department of South Australia will come to our systems so that we can do more.
However, as we’ve got to the end of 2022 it is evident the increasing cost of living has had a huge strain on individuals and families. The Foodbank Hunger Report highlighted the fact that half of the population with children went hungry in the last 12 months. Not only this, but we know that rising food prices, electricity prices and rent is going to put a strain on a lot of people in the coming year.
Foodbank last year spent $2.2 million on buying food in order to meet the demand and we’re going to need to do a lot more in the coming year. And of course the food that we buy is now at much higher prices.
Over the last few months, we’ve packed and distributed over 10,000 Christmas hampers to get that to those in need and to also support the agencies who are struggling to help their own families. However, we do need additional help, especially as now, on top of all the challenges we normally have, we have been appointed as the primary food relief provider for the floods in the Murraylands and in the Riverland. So we need to get extra food to be able to supply those needs.
As we head into the new year with increased demand, we ask you to continue to support Foodbank and donate to us if you can at foodbanksa.org.au/donate