FareShare Annual Report 2022

A message from our CEO Paul Conroy and President David Harris OAM

The last 12 months have been both exciting and challenging. We emerged from the initial disruption of the pandemic to return to our volunteer-powered model. However, living with COVID has meant we, like many other organisations in the charity sector, have struggled to return to full operational capacity and to cook the volume of meals we were cooking prior to the pandemic. With that said, it has been truly amazing to see volunteer numbers back to what they were pre-COVID, and it appears that the impact of the pandemic on FareShare is finally diminishing.

Maintaining steady meal production to meet demand over the last 12 months has presented a significant challenge. The two biggest influences on our ability to cook nutritious meals - the supply of ingredients and access to a volunteer workforce - have both been significantly disrupted. The severe floods have particularly impacted the consistent supply of vegetables to our kitchen in Queensland and reactivating our volunteer workforce has proven to be slow in all areas of the charity sector, particularly for our operations in Victoria which has been hardest hit by the lingering effects of COVID.  

However, impact for FareShare is not defined by the number of meals we cook. Our focus is to make every single meal count and to bring as much dignity and respect to food relief as possible to help Australians in times of hardship. This goal is seeing FareShare continually invest time, money and resources into the quality of our meals. While this means we spend greater time cooking and packing our meals, it also enables us to offer a broader choice of healthy and nutritious meals and to present them in contemporary, familiar and dignified formats. This is key to ensuring our meals provide emotional, as well as physical benefits, to every single person who eats them.

We continue to see an unprecedented level of food insecurity in the community with rising cost of living pressures, natural disasters and the pandemic hurting millions of Australians. These and other factors have created strong demand for free, healthy meals and increased the never-ending challenge to raise the necessary funds. We know that FareShare alone cannot meet this demand, and while we will cook as many meals as we can, we also appreciate the importance of collaborating with other charity kitchens. The last 12 months have seen us build strong relationships with like-minded cooking organisations and we will continue to dedicate time to share knowledge and ingredients to strengthen support for those in need. 

In addition to cooking wonderful meals, dignified food relief also requires getting the right meals to the people most in need. Distributing the majority of our own meals in Victoria allows us to have a direct line of communication to understand the meal needs and preferences of frontline charities and their clients. We will continue to build closer ties with these charities together with our key distribution partners, such as SecondBite and Foodbank QLD, as we work together to match individual meals and formats to the diverse needs of our community. By optimising collaboration, food relief organisations can reduce their operating costs and deliver increased social dividends to their generous donors.  

The last year also saw FareShare expand its specific meal programs with First Nations communities. Our commitment to support First Nations peoples, who suffer disproportionately high rates of food insecurity, was strengthened by the appointment of Jason Mollenhauer as First Nations Officer and the development of our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan which was launched in Queensland and Victoria during NAIDOC Week. (Please refer to the Reconciliation section of this report for more details)

In addition, FareShare has grown its relationship with selected regional supermarkets and Linfox, which has now distributed over 100,000 meals to smaller regional and remote areas in need of food relief. By partnering with such community-minded organisations and accessing their supply chains, we can send much-needed meals to people who aren’t nearly as well supported as those experiencing hardship in large metropolitan areas.  

FareShare has also taken strides to improve our environmental performance. Reducing food waste was a primary driver in FareShare’s creation and we continue to invest in ways to improve our sustainability performance from energy generation and storage, to packaging and pallet wrapping. (Please refer to the separate sustainability feature below)

Longstanding CEO Marcus Godinho stepped back from his management responsibilities to focus his efforts on further strengthening our existing relationships and developing new partnerships with supporters. On his recommendation, Paul Conroy was appointed CEO.

Whilst juggling the rapid and ongoing changes with recent evolutions of the pandemic, we have also been progressing our plans for our reimagined, enlarged Abbotsford facility that will help us to expand our ability to cook and distribute our new range of nutritious, appealing meals with greater impact. Our operational blueprint is well developed, and we hope to secure financial support in the coming months to allow us to commence the build in 2023. 

We thank everyone who has generously contributed to our mission to improve the lives of people in hardship with free, nutritious meals this year. We also want to acknowledge the ongoing financial support from the Victorian government and extend a heartfelt thank you to our food donors, including Woolworths. Speaking of, we would like to take a moment to acknowledge Woolworths as much more than a food donor. We are indebted to their generous support at all levels.

Thanks again to Les Baguley and his family for their ongoing support – access to their land in southeast Melbourne allows our gardeners and volunteers to cultivate vegetables which provide critical nutrition and added taste to our meals. 

We would like to extend a sincere thanks to Philip Brass AO, who recently stepped down from the FareShare board after over 12 years of wise counsel and support. We are very grateful for his invaluable contributions.

Finally, a big thank you to all the volunteers who have gone above and beyond in the toughest of times. FareShare could not exist without a community of people who share our passion and commitment to improve the lives of people doing it tough.  

A message from our Garden Program Manager Isabel Menssink

Our kitchen garden program has a simple goal – to ensure a constant, variety of fresh vegetables is always available to add taste and nutrition to our meals.

The difficult time faced during lockdowns and restricted working hours for our garden volunteers meant our busy spring harvest season was particularly challenging this year. Our small team of staff and dedicated volunteers tackled the task with gusto, harvesting over 30 tonnes of fresh, seasonal vegetables in spring. Our biggest harvest month of October reaped 12,332 kg of vegetables for the kitchen!

Overall, we grew 84,190 kg of vegetables across our three gardens. Our top crops were leek (14,057 kg),fennel (14,291 kg), zucchini (10,591 kg) and cauliflower (9853 kg). As ever, the majority of our crop was grown on the Baguley family farm.

Our Abbotsford garden remained focussed on growing fresh leafy greens and herbs for the kitchen. It delivered thousands of kilos of bok choy and silverbeet, zucchini and spring onions as well as an array of fresh herbs including basil, coriander, thyme, parsley, sage, tarragon and dill. Tomatillos, native to Mexico and central America, proved a new kitchen favourite and ideal for salsas and sauces.

Our Moorabbin Airport garden's most productive crops this year were the much-loved golden nugget pumpkins, cauliflower and leek. 

Our focus in the second half of the year was to better meet the kitchen’s needs and increase the diversity of vegetables grown. This year we grew 40 different crops, up from 28 in 2021.  The diversity helps us better manage crop rotations, stagger the harvests of labour- intensive crops and provide a diversity of nutrients and flavours for our meals. Our garden volunteers are now regularly harvesting 6-10 different crops per week, which certainly keeps things interesting. 

An undoubted highlight of the year occurred in May when our staff and volunteers welcomed 55 new volunteers to the Baguley family farm where we grow the bulk of our vegetables.  This much-needed boost to our team has been wonderful as we get to know one another and work together to keep growing our skills and friendships along with the veggies.

A message from our Logistics Manager Patrick Lanyon

Food rescue is both an important source of ingredients for our kitchens and a positive contributor to the health of our environment by keeping valuable, but polluting, resources from going to landfill.   

Over the past year we have rescued increased volumes of produce from more than 100 Woolworths stores in Victoria each week, benefiting from Woolworths’ strong investment in efforts to reduce food waste.

In addition, we have been the beneficiary of food that has been rescued by OzHarvest and SecondBite. We are grateful for this collaboration which has allowed us to cook more meals.

Our focus on accessing nutritious ingredients was also boosted by relationships with the Melbourne Market Authority and FreshState that have allowed us to rescue so much healthy produce from the wholesale market at Epping.

We have been fortunate that several food manufacturers reached out to donate products that may otherwise have gone to waste. Examples included frozen carrot spirals from Simplot and pasta from Rinoldi which were both put to excellent use by our chefs.

FareShare continues to distribute the bulk of our cooked meals to frontline charities in Victoria with SecondBite playing an important role.

After many years of collaboration, Melbourne Zoo ceased taking our food scraps for recycling into garden fertiliser. We are now exploring alternatives, including investment in our own biodigester, to ensure scraps such as pumpkin peel, meat bones and eggshells, can be turned into a useful resource. 

A message from our Victorian Volunteer Program Manager Rosemary Kelly

The past two years has been the most challenging in FareShare’s 21-year history. For an organisation which has always relied on a volunteer workforce, we have had to constantly adapt to maintain our operations.  

With significantly fewer volunteers lending a hand, the day-to-day task of ensuring enough vegetables are grown and sufficient meals are cooked to fulfil frontline charity orders is a constant stress. However, relative to many other volunteer-powered charities, we consider ourselves fortunate to have welcomed back so many loyal regulars. Overall, more than 1,000 volunteers contributed 43,446 hours of service during the year in Victoria. We look forward to inducting many more in the coming months.  

Regular volunteering

Once again, the pandemic posed serious challenges with lockdowns ensuring a bumpy ride during the second half of 2021.

Our driving, warehouse, garden and admin volunteers continued to provide invaluable support, carrying government worker permits when required.

Kitchen volunteering proved more problematic due to its indoor environment and the associated difficulties with social distancing. As a result, we reluctantly suspended kitchen shifts between July and November 2021.

When we reopened with health and safety front of mind, we found that many volunteers had made major changes to their lives and a significant percentage were either unavailable or still uncomfortable about returning. Not surprisingly, volunteer numbers have also been affected by higher than usual absence rates due to illness, isolation and long deferred holidays.

Despite these challenges, our annual volunteer survey in April revealed that our regulars are resilient folk who continue to feel very positive about their volunteering experience. More than two-thirds (68%) also volunteered elsewhere and of those 96% rated FareShare as very good or good, with 99% recommending FareShare to others as a place to volunteer.

Our top regular volunteer for the year was Joan Datson who volunteers in the kitchen, as a school supervisor and in the gardens. She clocked up an astonishing 750 hours over the 12 months.

Schools in the Kitchen Program

With the school program suspended during 2020-2021, we piloted an online program to interested schools in term 4 of 2021. This was not designed to replace our popular school volunteering experience but provided some context and information to students and teachers about FareShare and our mission.

We were delighted to reignite the full kitchen experience in March 2022 following a two-year suspension and to roll out new educational resources (pre and post shift) to deepen the engagement experience and ongoing impact of the program.

We were also pleased to appoint Pauline Malkoun, who has many years’ secondary teaching experience, as our new Schools Program Co-ordinator in April.

Since the resumption of the program, feedback from students and teachers alike has been glowing with most of our school shifts now booked for the remainder of the year.

We were grateful to secure funding to subsidise the program for schools serving areas of disadvantage from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and the Freemasons Foundation.

Corporate volunteering program

COVID cast the same long shadow over our corporate volunteering program with shifts in the kitchen and garden cancelled from mid-2021 as working from home became the norm.

When restrictions eased in November 2021, our kitchen gardens welcomed back work groups keen to help out in the great outdoors. Kitchen volunteering also resumed with some understandable hesitation from some organisations.

It wasn’t until February 2022 when further restrictions were eased and the government encouraged workers to return to their workplaces, that interest really picked up.

Corporate volunteering at FareShare offers the perfect opportunity for work colleagues to re-connect after so much time spent on screens. Bookings have been brisk and we were pleased to welcome many new businesses and organisations who have found the experience rewarding and enjoyable.

Volunteers have been the heart and soul of FareShare for over 20 years and this year we have been even more grateful for their incredible support and commitment.

A message from our Queensland Volunteer Program Manager Madison Buik

The last 12 months have seen COVID continue to cause disruptions, cancellations, and challenges for everyone. I am incredibly proud of the continued commitment from our regular volunteers who tirelessly roll up their sleeves and chop veggies, pack meals and jump in the FareShare van to deliver meals to urban and regional communities.

Early 2022 saw horrific floods cause serious damage in Brisbane and to our southern neighbours in Northern NSW. Some of our own volunteers were impacted by these destructive floods, and yet knowing there were people who had suffered more they still showed up for their shifts after spending the weekend rectifying water damage and clearing mud from their homes.

During this time, we saw an increase in demand for our meals, especially in Northern NSW where our kitchen team sent thousands of meals to assist those who had lost everything in the floods. This grew the sense of community among the volunteers who were more than happy to chop hundreds of kilos of vegetables and pack thousands of meals on their shifts to be of service. We couldn’t have provided over 90,000 flood relief meals without this support.  

Our Corporate Volunteering program is continuing to grow in Brisbane. Over the last 12 months we have welcomed many new teams into our Brisbane kitchen. All walk away feeling incredibly satisfied with what they have accomplished during their three-hour shift.  Many corporate volunteers have such a good experience they register to join our regular volunteer taskforce and continue the good work. A big shoutout to the corporate teams who reached out during the floods to offer their support and organised ‘emergency flood relief’ teams to jump in the kitchen to help us cook.

Finally, a big thank you to all Queensland volunteers both regular and corporate for your efforts this last year. You continue to amaze us with your dedication to FareShare and your commitment to assist your community with the best possible meals.

It was a year of milestones for FareShare’s reconciliation efforts.

It began with the recruitment of Jason Mollenhauer, FareShare’s inaugural First Nations Officer.

Jason is a proud Kangoulu man hailing from Wagan & Jagalingou Country. He was raised between Wakka Wakka and Turrbal and Jagera Nations. His Mother, Marina, was a Cherbourg ‘dormitory girl’ and a member of the Stolen Generation.

Jason has extensive experience in community development, building and maintaining professional relationships with a variety of stakeholders and partners including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders Groups, organisations, residents, local government leaders, and councils.

Since his appointment, he has used his expertise to drive our First Nations engagement and programs and has achieved some great outcomes for First Nations Australians through the Meals for the Mob program, flood relief efforts, and the creation and implementation of our Reconciliation Action Plan.

Meals for the Mob (MFTM) was developed in consultation with First Nations communities and services to provide targeted food relief in the form of free, nutritious, and tasty ready-to-eat meals.

Empowering, community driven and adaptive, our MFTM pilot program ran in four regional communities in Queensland and Northern NSW for a three-month period from November 2021 to February 2022. It delivered 20,850 tasty, nutritious meals to First Nations communities and services, supporting families and individuals experiencing food insecurity.

The recipes for the six community-selected meals were developed by FareShare Brisbane’s head chef James Fien in collaboration with the University of Queensland’s School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. Overseen by their Chair, Professor Helen Truby, the key objectives were to maximise nutrition and deliver an appealing, familiar taste profile tailored to First Nations Australians.

Overall, feedback was insightful and overwhelmingly positive and pointed to high satisfaction among meal recipients, allowing FareShare to work through some practical suggestions to finesse the program.

These include seeking additional resources, developing a wider variety of meal choices, reaching a greater number of remote communities, creating more appropriate packaging, engaging urban First Nations groups to help cook the meals, and many more. 

Towards the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, a deluge of floods tore through Southern and Central Queensland and Northern New South Wales. FareShare responded immediately and supplied meals to our First Nations partners to support devastated communities including people living in cars, tents and evacuation centres.

Upon seeing the devastation in places such as Lismore, Ballina and Casino, Jason remarked that: “It’s going to take a long time to come back from this. We are going to stay on the ground and be there for the community. We can lift our support if necessary.”

And that is what FareShare has done, committing to ongoing support to communities still struggling to get back on their feet.

The year culminated in the release of our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). This heralds another FareShare first and signifies our commitment to helping improve food insecurity for First Nations peoples living in urban, regional and remote parts of Australia.

Our Reflect RAP sets out measurable actions and begins FareShare’s journey to reconciliation both internally and externally with the partners and in the communities in which we operate.

Our RAP also captures the resounding commitment, enthusiasm and desire of our board, staff and volunteers to contribute to the initiatives. We are excited to take these steps and to continue building our knowledge of, and respect for, First Nations histories and cultures.

We look forward to progressing our reconciliation efforts through the four phases – Reflect, Innovate, Stretch, Elevate – in the years ahead, and to sharing our achievements with you.

FareShare remains as committed to sustainability as the day we set out on our core mission to rescue food that would otherwise go to waste and cook it into nutritious meals.

Food waste remains one of the biggest challenges to sustainability. An estimated 30% or all food produced for human consumption never makes it to our plates. As a result, it is estimated that if food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter after the US and China.¹

When we waste food, we also waste the resources used to grow our food (water, soils and energy) including the primary nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – that sustain farming, plant growth, and all life on earth. Add to this all the energy used to process, package and transport food and it’s a recipe for disaster.

So, by rescuing 897,612kg of food this year, FareShare helped reduce the environmental impacts of food waste, cut greenhouse pollution and conserve natural resources.

Our kitchens did whatever they could to reduce food waste too. What few food scraps are left, such as vegetable peel and eggshells, are either composted or sent to places that can repurpose them into gardening products, such as a farmer in the Lockyer Valley near Brisbane.

FareShare constantly seeks ways to improve our other processes to reduce our environmental footprint and become even more sustainable too.

Our new Sustainability Working Group is taking the initiative.  In May 2022, Tesla batteries were installed in our Melbourne warehouse. These were kindly donated by FareShare’s long term partner ENGIE, and connect us to the Simply Energy Virtual Power Plant.

This allows us to store over 40 kWh per day in energy generated from our solar panels, use it at night, and share any surplus with the local community. The result is great news for FareShare’s environmental sustainability. Thank you ENGIE.

During the year, our Melbourne warehouse switched to a reusable pallet wrap made from polyester and PVC. The material can be used thousands of times, massively reducing our reliance on single-use, stretch-film, plastic pallet wraps. Brisbane is currently trialling this too.

FareShare also increased its use of reusable crates to transport meals and food. This helps reduce single-use cardboard and the need for our charity meal relief partners to sort and recycle. They are also easier to stack and carry, making them more convenient.   

One of our major changes last year was the introduction of single-serve meals. These were designed to improve the choice, dignity, and presentation of our meals. They are also ideal for supporting individuals who may previously have received a family serve. There are also environmental dividends to the new portion sizes with less risk of food waste at the consumer end. 

The fully recyclable packaging was made possible by a wonderful collaboration of supporters. We acknowledge Sealed Air (the trays), Peacock Bros (labels), and the Brian M Davis Charitable Foundation, Charles and Cornelia Goode Foundation, and Gandel Foundation for the packaging machines.

In early 2022, our Melbourne kitchen partnered with Reground, a social enterprise that helps organisations create a circular economy through waste collection and minimisation projects. They collect and recycle our soft plastic waste to keep it out of landfill and our oceans.

Over the course of only a few months, Reground helped us prevent 585kg of soft plastic from ending up in landfill or our oceans, helped us to stop emitting 468kg worth of greenhouse gas emissions, and recycled 117 trolleys of plastics for us.

We are boosting the solar capacity of our Brisbane kitchen with additional panels to complement our 100kw solar system improving our environmental and financial sustainability. These are due to be installed later this year.

FareShare’s Melbourne kitchen gardens have a strong sustainability focus. Not only did they grow 84 tonnes of vegetables during this past year, but they implemented a range of environmental measures.

Our plot on the Baguley family farm is now recycling much more and has started composting used paper towels (a good carbon source) and the vegetable scraps at the farm. Our Abbotsford kitchen garden has also been composting scraps from the kitchen.

Our kitchen gardens utilise mushroom straw - a waste product from mushroom growing donated by a local oyster mushroom farmer - as mulch. The benefits include an increase in our soil’s organic matter and less water evaporation, thereby reducing irrigation volumes and frequency.

Our Moorabbin kitchen garden is trialling a multi-species autumn/winter cover crop on some beds. This will hopefully increase soil organic matter and water holding capacity while decreasing irrigation frequency. It should also add nutrients to the spring crops that follow, stimulate beneficial fungi and microbes in the soil, and suppress weeds.

All three of our gardens are optimising crop rotation to reduce pests and the impacts of soil-borne pathogens, such as white blister. Our garden crew also plant flowers to host beneficial insects to tackle pest insects.

There is always plenty more to be done, which is why our Sustainability Working Group will continue to drive improvements.