Richard Watson is the NSW State Manager of charity food rescue organisation OzHarvest, which is based in Alexandria. Founded 18 years ago by social entrepreneur Ronnie Kahn, OzHarvest ‘rescues’ food that would otherwise wind up in landfill and redistributes it to 400 charities who make it available to their customers and clients.
There’s enough food in the world to feed everyone.
As well as food distribution, OzHarvest delivers educational programs such as the Feast program in primary schools and the Nourish training program, which equips young people aged 16–24 with a formal hospitality qualification. The organisation also runs supermarkets based on a ‘take what you need, give what you can’ philosophy.
Over the past two years, the core remit of OzHarvest’s operations has been food relief in response to the COVID pandemic.
‘We’ve really stepped up and met the demand. Lots of people are not able to afford food; people who never thought they would need food relief,’ Richard says, rolling the high-volume numbers off the top of his head:
Seventeen thousand cooked meals a week, scaling up to 10,000 hampers a week.
Richard and his teams are leaders in environmental stewardship. In addition to the core activity of redistributing edible food, OzHarvest takes a holistic approach to sustainability: they use bio packaging, run paperless offices and recycle across the whole business.
The OzHarvest team have also established a community garden at their headquarters; the garden itself was donated by global property group Goodman. It’s home to native bees and produces herbs that are used in the meals prepared on site. It’s also an urban oasis that encourages staff to spend time outside.
We call the kids in the Feast programme changemakers – they’re like sponges.
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