This Christmas not only has Need a Feed been busy running events but the local charity is also facing a surge in demand for its services.
Need a Feed partners with 20 other charity and service providers, providing food for them to give to their clients.
"Right now, we can’t meet the demand, we have had to knock people back," says Need a Feed CEO and founder Shaz Harrison. "There was one organisation that wanted 70 food packages, we could only give 25.”
During the year, Need a Feed holds a community dinner each week on a Friday and runs a mobile coffee van in Wollongong. In the lead-up to Christmas, they organised a special Christmas dinner, with hams and pavlova.
“It’s about sharing a meal with other people,” says Shaz. “There are a lot of lonely people around and they don’t get to sit down and chat over a meal like a family. So we encourage it to be a family-type meal with some laughs.”
On Thursday, December 15, the team held a special Christmas coffee morning in Wollongong. For the past five years Need a Feed’s coffee van has been offering good affordable coffee and a chat in Globe Lane for those in need.
Shaz says Need a Feed reaches out to “people who have fled domestic violence. We help them to fill their cupboards when they’ve moved to a safe place to live. There are also homeless people. There are people with mental health issues. Some people do not want to leave their homes, they have social anxiety issues. We work with organisations who take the food to them. There are also people who are lonely.”
Shaz has always been a helper.
“I just knew I wanted to help and provide food, because everyone deserves the basics in life, the food.
“I just love people … I want people to understand that things don’t have to stay the way they are. You can have forks in the road of life and you can go that way or that way, but you just have to decide.
"If you look at Oprah Winfrey, she didn’t start off like Oprah Winfrey as we know her. She came from really tough times. So I think anyone can do it.
"You decide what you want to do and you find a way to make it happen and the universe or God will provide it and it will happen. If you believe it enough, if you work out your' why' then 'the how' will work itself out.”
In the beginning, Shaz didn’t know the stories of the people in Globe Lane and they didn’t know hers.
“My life has not been smooth and I have first-hand experience of what it’s like to be in a domestic violence situation where I could have gone back, could have gone back, could have gone back, like I know people do … When I look back, there was a lot of mental manipulation: when your normal starts here and then your normal creeps up and it is not even really you and it’s not your normal, but you don’t even realise after 22 years.”
The philosophy of Need a Feed is based on three pillars: Connect, Empower and Provide.
Shaz explains: “We connect with people at the coffee van and at our community dinner … The people we help do not have lots of positive role models or people in their lives. So we are the positive in their life and help to connect them to different services.
"Sometimes they don’t want us to solve their problems. Sometimes they just want to offload.”
Need a Feed often invites inspiring speakers to its community dinners. At the Christmas dinner, Master Paul gave a Taekwondo lesson and at the end of his lesson the children present had a go at breaking a brick in half.
Need a Feed is looking for donors who can contribute on a regular basis.
“We are trying to build our donor base because we are not government-funded. We rely on private financial donations to do what we do and without it we cannot meet the demand."
Shaz shares a story about a homeless man: “He’d been homeless for 231 days, finally got a place – sometimes if someone has a pet, it limits their options … then there’s costs involved: there’s bonds and he needed curtains, there were different things that were a big cost for him. That kind of situation can affect things, and the cost of living – it is so expensive. Everything has gone up. Everything.”
To donate, visit Need A Feed's website