Let’s support Melbourne’s communities cultivate connections, develop lifelong skills, and spread joy through the sharing, preparing, and cooking of delicious nutritious food! Keep cooking with us !  

If, like us, you love food and cooking; and recognise the benefits learning to cook brings, we invite you to support our community cooking!

Here’s how your donation supports our work: 

• $30 bakes 30 loaves of sourdough and starter (from 10kg of flour).
• $55 provides ingredients for five young people in an After School Cooking club. 
• $125 provides ingredients for a community meal for 8 people from our food pantry.
• $275 opens Carlton Kitchen Library each week. 
• $600 runs a month-long cooking club.  
• $1200 strengthens our ability to source long term funding in match funding grants through councils and philanthropic organisations. 

During lockdown, so many of us embraced and realized the opportunities cooking can bring, the resilience it builds and the wellbeing and joy it provides. Help us help others embrace the kitchen; and Let's Keep Cooking! 

Thanks to your generous support during the pandemic of 2020, Cultivating Community was able to assist hundreds of individuals across Melbourne’s public housing communities by providing culturally appropriate fresh food at one of the most challenging times we have faced together.  

We joined forces with like-minded organisations, and through working together our skills and funding work even harder for us all to benefit those that needed it most. This included moving online to deliver our cooking classes, getting volunteering involved in raising seeds for our community gardens, and purchasing fresh ingredients for our food relief pantry and packs. 

Our Food Relief Survey (2020) conducted at our COVID-19 Fresh Food Parcel Program told us that 63.7% of respondents worried about how they would pay for groceries in the last 12 months, and 31% reported that they had run out of food and could not afford to buy anymore. 

“Prices of fresh food have also gone up, and combined with increasing pressures on their financial resources, people are having trouble accessing fresh food.” – Food Relief Survey Respondent. 

So, whats planned in 2023?

We are developing a modern food pantry program that provides dignity and joy to those that use it. We begin to offer opportunities via volunteering and pathways to employment through our upcoming programs. We are increasing our High-Rise Baking Group, creating more bread, more often. 

Our North Richmond Lets Keep Cooking has gone from strength to strength and with a new Learning and Education Kitchen in Public Housing Tower 106 we seek additional funds to keep the space activated. 

We will also be continuing projects, such as After School Cooking clubs, school-based cooking activities, community cooking and meals, baking classes, and more.  

Over the past 24 years, we’ve seen how cooking (at all ages) brings the joy of creation, a sense of confidence allowing connection with others, pride in developing human potential, and a greater ability to manage budgets, eat better and improve wellbeing. 

This campaign and the initiatives it supports has the potential to contribute to the meeting of targets within Sustainable Development Goal #1 No Poverty, #2 Zero Hunger, #3 Good Health and Well-being, #4 Quality Education, #5 Gender Equality, #8 Decent Work and Economic Growth, #10 Reduced Inequalities, #11 Sustainable Cities and Communities, #12 Responsible Consumption and Production, #13 Climate Action, #16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, and #17 Partnerships for the Goals.