Volunteer

Several weeks ago, I was flipping through the Sydney Morning Herald's Tuesday supplement (Good Living, which contains delicious-looking recipes, craft ideas, and profiles on different restaurants, volunteers opportunities, etc. I read it weekly) when I stumbled upon a fantastic sounding company: a little four-and-a-half year old place called Oz Harvest.

Based off a similar company in the States, Oz Harvest sends out four refrigerated vans to specific restaurants, cafes and businesses each day to collect unsold/extra food items and drop them at various charities and homeless shelters around Sydney, Canberra and Wollongong (about an hour south of Sydney.) This, I thought, was exactly the kind of company I was looking for: while working at the restaurant last semester, I was irked by the fact that the portions were often much too big and left unfinished, yet rather than composting the leftover food, we were told to just scrape it into the trash bins. Such a waste! Of course I knew we couldn't sell the food from the plates, but my guilty feeling resonated with me through the rest of my plate-scraping time there.

The article included an email address for those interested in helping out, so I sent them a message. I was soon informed about the "van experience" opportunity: basically, volunteers ride along with the driver, who might have two or three weekly routes all over the city and Wollongong, and help pick up and drop off the food. Sounded great! I pitched the idea to my flatmate Shellie, who'd been keen on doing a little volunteering too, and we went for it last Thursday.

Since only one volunteer can ride with each driver, Shellie was paired with an older guy named Bob (whose brother happens to run Harry's de Wheels pie stand - an Australian institution since 1945 that my friend Aussie friend Brendan took me to when I first moved to Sydney) and I went with Matt, who'd been with the company since it started. His Thursday route took us over the bridge into the northern beaches and western suburbs, so not only was I helping out hundreds of people, I was also getting a tour of the parts of the city I'd never been.

We picked up food from all sorts of places: pies from Harry's, bread and pastries from several bakeries, homemade gnocchi and leftover lamb from the TAFE university cooking school, fruit and eggs from Woolworths' grocery store, organic vegetables and biscuits from a sweet little store, and soup/sandwiches from the Westpac bank's building cafes. Oz Harvest smartly leaves plastic containers at each site, so most of what we pick up is usually packed and ready to go. The vans are also on-call to pick up from other sites along their route, so we ended up stopping by an office to pick up 14 crates of boxed lunches left over from a corporate meeting.

Drop-offs were the fun part: Matt had good connections with many of the people we delivered to, so we stopped to chat with some people outside a battered womens' shelter and Matthew Talbot's, Sydney's largest mens' homeless shelter.

It was a great day (long, too - 10-6!), but I wish we'd had more interaction with the people we were helping. Shel and I decided our next volunteer endeavor might be at a soup kitchen in the city...

http://www.ozharvest.org/