A food recycling program in Sunshine is redirecting perfectly good grub to thousands of needy people and renewing the spirit of others who feel like they’ve been thrown on life’s rubbish tip.
Social enterprise A Gesture, in partnership with national charity SecondBite, has been helping disadvantaged people by rescuing food from major suppliers such as Coles and Aldi since 2010.
A Gesture also provides accredited training to disadvantaged people from all walks of life, including the homeless, those with disabilities or criminal histories, and at-risk school leavers.
The program gives people like Norman Turner, 58, a reason to get out of bed.
Mr Turner, who suffers from an acquired brain injury that has left him with slurred speech, works part-time at A Gesture’s Sunshine warehouse.
Having been employed since he left school at age 15, he was devastated when declared redundant in June, 2010. He told the
Weekly he felt like “a plastic or cardboard milk container … buried in landfill”.
“I fell into a very dark, foreboding and dangerous place called depression that I couldn’t escape from on my own,” he said.
But through A Gesture, he’s turned his life around and is on track to complete a warehousing operations certificate.
“No longer do I feel I’m an empty, worthless shell of a man that only takes up space,” he said. “I now have a positive sense of value and purpose.”
A Gesture provides meals for 1200 people every week and distributes more than 150,000 kilograms of food each year.
More volunteers are needed in a variety of roles.
» 9312 0512 or secondbite.org
