THIS TIME LAST YEAR: PITCHING IN TO HELP OUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since we experienced the devastating floods in Brisbane, south-east Queensland, and northern New South Wales. During that time the demand for free and healthy meals increased significantly as many people found themselves without homes, food, and other basic necessities.

Community Canteen (CC) is a volunteer led and run not for profit that makes healthy meals for those in need. CC partners with many organisations, including Dux, to provide up to 800 meals a week. One of its partner organisations, Communify, lets CC cook hundreds of meals, in its premises at the old Newmarket Bowls Club. Those premises were significantly damaged from early in the flooding and unable to be used for months.

Dux had already been working with CC for over 12 months at that time, regularly creating the menu and participating in cooking the meals. The first weekend the flooding began, we heard that CC was going to pause cooking as it didn’t have premises for preparing meals. In response, Dux opened its kitchen to CC to allow their volunteers to keep preparing meals which were needed more than ever.

While Dux provided the kitchen, and several Dux staff pitched in to help, true credit goes to CC and its wonderful leaders and volunteers. They barely blinked as everything familiar changed around them and they simply got on with doing what they do – preparing hundreds of meals. Leaders arranged more food supplies to cook extra meals and found additional distribution points. Volunteers, some of whom had been affected personally, cooked in a kitchen unfamiliar to them, which is no small feat when you’re cooking hundreds of meals.

While operations for Dux and CC have returned to normal, there are many people who are still experiencing lasting impacts from the devastating floods. If you’d like to get involved in preparing meals for people who are in need for a variety of reasons, contact CC and get involved.

You can also check out more of what they do on Facebook and Instagram.