Community Friends provides food relief to more people than ever before

Community Friends is a local Brisbane charity providing free, life-changing food relief and support to the homeless, disadvantaged and people in need.

Founded in 2011, Community Friends provides essential food and groceries every Wednesday to more than 150 people and their families living in West End and greater Brisbane.

Sadly, COVID-19 is severely impacting Queensland’s hunger crisis, with Community Friends seeing many people, including casual workers and international students, being forced to reach out for help for the very first time.

To tackle the increasing demand in these two new groups, the charity has started an additional food run on Thursdays for TAFE Queensland to provide them with as much food as possible for their local and international students facing hunger.

Mark McDonnell, Community Friends Founder and Director, said the charity is experiencing very challenging times with more people seeking food relief than ever before.

“COVID-19 has resulted in a lot more work, which is why we now start setting up and preparing the food much earlier than we used to. It also costs us more money and requires more volunteers, as we now prepack all food into reusable bags, so people seeking food relief don’t touch the food directly.”

“Prior to the pandemic, people could pick which food they wanted. Now, they get two prepacked bags of groceries only. They don’t get the opportunity to go through the bags or say what they want or don’t want. If there is food left over, they can go through a second time,” he said.

The charity also provides milk, bread, hot meals in takeaway containers, noodles, and small goods such as drinks and muesli bars in addition to the two prepacked bags, which people can choose to take.

Community Friends aims to give everyone enough food to feed themselves and their families for three to four days. However, one of Community Friends’ volunteers said, since COVID-19, they have been struggling to provide enough food for everyone who needs it.

“The saddest part was on one of the days we still had about 30 people cueing up and we didn’t have enough bags for them,” she said.

With more and more people seeking food relief, the charity has been forced to move to a bigger location, Punyapa Park in West End, as there wasn’t enough space for them to enforce social distancing.

Foodbank Queensland provides essential food directly to charities, including Community Friends, who support people seeking food relief. We currently work with over 250 charities across the state. If you are a Queensland charity, Foodbank Queensland membership is a great way to support your food relief projects, offering your organisation a reliable source of food and groceries all year round. If you are in a position to help Foodbank Queensland provide more food across the state to support Queenslanders in need, please consider joining the fight against hunger as a regular giver.

North Queensland flood recovery support

Long after the flood waters have gone, families and individuals across North Queensland are slowly getting back on their feet. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our frontline charity partners in the region, food was one less thing to worry about for those affected by the floods.

In just one month, we were able to assist nearly 8,000 people with food relief. Thanks to your generous support and our wonderful partners, we were able to provide more than 900 family hampers, FareShare frozen meals, a whopping 50 tonnes of cleaning products supplied by Colgate and Palmolive, along with vital household goods. All of which was transported, for free, by Linfox and AHG.

On behalf of Foodbank and our frontline charity partners, thank you for your ongoing generous donations and support. It really does make a difference.

Our day out at IKEA North Lakes!

It was a busy day for the Foodbank team as we partnered up with Matt Preston and IKEA North Lakes for a cooking demonstration involving the famous IKEA meatballs! We invited customers to come and chat with us, find out more about what we do and enter a raffle for a chance to win some IKEA goodies!

We also had the opportunity to speak during the cooking demonstration about everyday things we can do to cut food waste. Simple things such as meal planning, making a shopping list, not being tempted by the 2-for-1 offers and freezing leftovers.

You might be wondering what happened to the fresh produce displayed during the cooking demonstration. Well, just under 50kgs of cauliflower, melons, herbs and a variety of other fruit and vegetables were all donated to Foodbank and snapped up by our charity partners.

Thank You function at Government House

The beautiful gardens and heritage listed residence of Government House provided the perfect setting to personally thank our donors and supporters. Guests had the opportunity to mingle on the Government House lawns before being welcomed into Government House.

Guests heard from the His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC, Governor of Queensland, who highlighted the crucial work that Foodbank does within the community, across the state and across Australia.

His Excellency paid tribute to our donors and supporters, acknowledging their contributions to Foodbank Queensland.

We would like to thank His Excellency and Mrs de Jersey for their ongoing support and for welcoming Foodbank Queensland and guests into Government House. We would also like to thank all of our donors and supporters, who help us every day as we strive to end hunger in Queensland.

And what a record! 836 cans of spaghetti, packed and labelled in an hour. Well done team!

North Queensland flood support

The front line services do an amazing job getting people back on their feet immediately after natural disasters. What we do at Foodbank is provide immediate and ongoing support to families in need.

With the support of our donors, some of the items we have been able to send to North Queensland include:

• Two pallets of water thanks to Schweppes Asahi
• 16 pallets of assorted cleaning products and materials thank to TrendPac
• Five pallets of eggs thanks to Australian Pasteurized Eggs
• Toilet paper
• Weetbix and Vitabrits from Sanitarium and Uncle Toby’s
• Jam
• UHT Milk
• Tinned Fruit and vegetables
• Baked beans and tinned spaghetti
• Bottle water
• Pasta and noodles
• Ready to eat frozen meals thanks to Foodbank’s collaboration with FareShare

We’re incredibly grateful to our logistics partners Linfox (free rail freight), and AHG (free road freight and storage), without whom we would not be able to transport much needed food relief.

Turn your empty containers into a donation and help those in need.