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Lots to ‘like’ about Streetlevel cafe upgrade

26 July 2012

Celebrity Chef Curtis Stone serves a meal at Streetlevel’s Hope Cafe. (Photo: Shairon Paterson)


The Salvation Army’s Streetlevel Hope Cafe in Sydney will soon be offering an even better service to the community, after winning a cash grant through a newspaper-run competition recently.

Project Local is an initiative developed and operated by NewsLocal newspapers in Sydney. Every couple of months, newspapers involved in the scheme give a $2500 grant to what is judged the project that provides the most benefit to its community.

The winner is selected according to the number of “likes” it receives on the Project Local website from the public.

“We used The Salvation Army network to support us and people got behind us and voted for us,” says Sydney Streetlevel Mission Director Robyn Evans.

Robyn says the grant will enable Streetlevel Hope Cafe to improve the services it has been providing to the Surry Hills community for the past 10 years.

“We want to update some of our resources in our cafe and just be able to provide a better service to our community by having better equipment and even better food,” she says.

The cafe also plans to use the grant to help launch a new fruit and vegetable program partnership with Coles supermarkets and SecondBite. Not-for-profit organisation SecondBite already receives fruit and vegetables from Coles no longer deemed sellable, which it then distributes to people in need. Streetlevel Hope Cafe now plans to use this produce too.

“It’s no longer sellable, but it’s still edible,” says Robyn. “So rather than it going to waste it comes to us and we’re able to use it in our cafe to help people who would not be able to access healthy food options.”

Celebrity chef Curtis Stone recently visited the cafe to help launch the partnership with Coles and SecondBite.

Streetlevel Hope Cafe serves breakfast and lunch five days a week and dinner on Friday nights, which keeps the staff and volunteers busy.

“Our staff are fantastic,” says Robyn. “Our cafe is certainly very busy, but it’s able to support a lot of people in our community.”

Comments

  1. This is a wonderful initiative of which I'm sure is showered with good blessings.
    Back to bare Roots as per the Mission Statement. This is exactly the type of initiative I will be putting forward to Kilbirnie Core Counsel, Ayrshire Scotland.

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