By Eleanor Wilson
As the demand for emergency food relief in South East Melbourne continues to rise, one local charity says it desperately needs to upsize its venue to continue to provide for a growing customer base.
It was her own experience with food insecurity that pushed Narre Warren North local BB Stednik to put her career on hold to dedicate her time to emergency food relief.
After volunteering with Seventh-day Adventist humanitarian group ADRA for many years, in March this year Mrs Stednik and some of her colleagues took the leap to create their own charity, the Find a Penny Foundation.
Through the foundation, 20 fulltime volunteers and many casual volunteers work hard to provide a twice-weekly hot meal service and a grocery distribution program from a small club room at Hampton Park Junior Football Club.
With the cost of living rising, Find A Penny now feeds over 3000 hungry locals every week, with hundreds of families queuing outside the club rooms on a Thursday for fresh groceries.
But Find A Penny has quickly outgrown its space at the club.
“Covid brought to us a massive number of people who can hardly make ends meet,” she said.
“We can see the desperation…the demand is huge. Previously people who accessed our services would not take bananas with lots of brown dots on them, now they take absolutely everything.”
The lack of space at the club has caused the foundation to put some of its programs on hold, including a community dinner program and a second grocery distribution day.
“We’d love to provide hot dinners at least once a month but for that we need a place where it can accommodate,” Mrs Stednik said.
Sharing the club room with the local football club means that in between donation days, the dozens of grocery crates, packages of frozen and refrigerated food and thousands of items of non- perishable goods the foundation gives away must be removed from the club room.
As a result, Mrs Stednik and her husband transport the food to and from her Narre Warren North home every week.
She estimates half of her house is taken up by food storage.
Unable to outsource a kitchen, Mrs Stednik also invites fellow volunteers into her home each week to cook meals for the foundation’s soup program, which operates at Dandenong station on Fridays and a local caravan park on Wednesdays.
“It would be great to have a larger space where we can actually accommodate the demand of our services,” she said.
Mrs Stednik said she would also like to extend the accessibility of the foundation by employing volunteers with disabilities.
“We currently have one volunteer who uses a wheelchair, but the space at the club is too small and not accessible for her, so she can’t participate as much as we would like,” she said.
Mrs Stednik said she hopes the community will be able to come together and help the foundation find a solution.
“It would be great if some local businesses would be able to assist us with a bigger venue,” she said.
“We have a much larger vision for how we want to help the community, but it’s just not possible right now with the size of our venue.”
Mrs Stednik hopes that with a new venue, the charity can also expand to hold dinners for families with disabled children, a service she said is lacking in the area.
If you would like to get in contact with the Find A Penny Foundation, contact BB on 0425 747 866.
