Katie Scarf, Camperdown Food Pantry Manager:

 “Addi Road Food Pantry Camperdown is a real mix of people because of the density of the area. There’s a lot of high-needs social housing complexes amongst multimillion dollar homes. The demographics lead to bizarre combinations with both the volunteers and the customers.

 “So at Camperdown we get customers at the Food Pantry who come along because they care about food waste and they want to go to a unique hub that helps prevent that.

 “Then we get our other customers who rely very heavily on us for affordable or free food. The latter are people who might never think to eat fruit and vegetables at all. They tend to live on packs of noodles; or rice cream… I never knew what that was before, it’s long-life rice pudding in a tin, fantastic for people who don’t have teeth, they love it.

 “The Food Pantry also works as a place for people to connect to other services like housing, lawyers, free health checks. They just don’t know where to get all that, any of that. We get people turning up who have arrived from, like, Queensland with only a plastic bag and a toothbrush and no shoes on. They ask, ‘Can I have food? Do you know where I can get a shower? Housing? A check up?’ The Pantry is a place to connect people to other services and programs.

 “Just like the customers, the staff and vols are from all walks of life. There are volunteers from places of profound privilege – and others who have come out of prison and are starting afresh. They all get along. I love them. It was funny, a group of us were having a coffee other day: one person was finance guy from Hong Kong; another had done a few chunks of time in gaol; there was a woman who had grown up in Argentina; there were about seven of us with very different life stories. The only thing we could work out we had in common was that every one of us had been to a Robbie Williams concert at some time or other!”