When we lose control of our lives, failing to feed ourselves and our families is where we can feel the most pain, the greatest lack of agency and loss of pride.
As cost-of-living pressures escalate and everything from rental hikes to mortgage pressures – as well as utilities, phone and shopping bills – continue to rise and rise, we are being taken from one breaking point to the next.
Holding your life together can get very hard.
On bad days you don’t hold it together at all.
The struggles around us make it that much tougher… unable to help ourselves; unable to help one another.
How much more can we take?
This is the question that keeps coming up in conversations everywhere. Exasperated, angry, desperate in form.
Economists and politicians, journalists and commentators… they all have their explanations and, sometimes, a few answers. But it seems to change nothing.
If anything, there is a feeling things are getting much, much worse.
We are under no illusions about this situation at Addi Road.
Yes, there will always be inequality, always be problems. But do things have to be quite so bad, so bitterly unequal and extreme as they are now?
Wire sculptures by resident Addi Road artist Barbara Licha
There can come a point where an individual is irreparably damaged, even broken by cost-of-living struggles. This tragedy is not singular. It affects everyone: those who are battling, their partners, their children, their friends… resonating further outwards, destabilising the idea of community itself.
Can we afford to lose that cohesion? How much suffering and isolation is acceptable; how many are expendable as the pressures continue? Is it truer than ever that we used to be a society – but now we are an economy?
Addi Road Community Organisation itself is susceptible to this crisis. We, too, fight to function; we, too, struggle to maintain an effective way of being. We, too, try not to let the pressures bend us out-of-shape and distort our daily purpose and best intentions.
Small-to-medium-size charities and community and civil society organisations like us are having similar existential battles to the individuals and communities they serve, all the while they do their best to confront the growing levels of need and anxiety – and likewise put on a ‘brave face’.
Why so many charities and community groups like Addi Road are taking up the slack for government is a huge and complex area for analysis.
Many of these same smaller entities offer a vital bridge between a handful of well-funded, large-scale organisations above them and what is going on below at street level.
It’s a fact that the larger groups have a financial and funding hold on what we unfortunately have to describe as ‘the hunger monopoly’.
The more monolithic brand organisations continue to do very good work at scale. That’s not the point. The issue is getting useful action and immediate results at the coalface of need, better engagements at the truest ‘listening’ and living space where policy must adapt daily and intimately with real and intense needs.
Based in Marrickville, Addi Road is currently feeding 8,500 people per week through our Food Pantry on site at the community centre and through our sister pantry store located across town in Camperdown.
Requests for $10 food vouchers have almost doubled since January of this year, from 30 to 50 a day on average and as many as 80 when a Friday hits and people know a hard weekend of coping is ahead of them. Plenty of people don’t ask. It’s those who don’t ask – or feel they can’t ask – who worry us the most.
Shame is the greatest suppressant to any truth about who – and how many – are struggling out there. Sometimes Addi Road staff or volunteers will get talking to someone and it suddenly becomes clear just how much help they really need. We all share a little in this shame and anger in those kind of interchanges, their awkward and unexpected revelations ; everyone has to learn a new kind of language to even begin communicating – and, just maybe, get through to the problem.
At our weekly Wednesday Night Lights event in Marrickville, we offer free sit-down hot meals and free wraparound services (medical help, legal advice, haircuts, laundry) to the homeless, the insecurely housed and anyone battling or feeling overwhelmed, no questions asked – with an average of 100 people attending, many on a regular basis. Some nights are quieter; others bursting with the need and energy, nearer 200 people enjoying a strange kind party where the anniversary being celebrated is people coming together to enjoy their one good meal of the week, with the added bonus of not feeling they are alone and ignored.
We also run a monthly ‘Let’s Get Cooking’ program (informally known as ‘The Cook-Up’) across town via our Addi Road Food Pantry Camperdown kitchen, providing a free hot meal and dessert at lunchtime on the last Friday of every month. The free meal is matched with the distribution of boxed food hampers – and a cooking lesson that explains how the meal and dessert of the day was prepared, held inside Mission Australia’s Common Ground social housing complex.
The ideal is to do more than just help people with handouts. We try to bring everyone together as a community in ways that also make them feel good, connecting people to one other socially and offering additional supplies, networks and skills that might sustain them past the moment at hand.
Let’s talk about this human picture, those moments. Three examples; three little case studies…
One: a mother and her 12-year-old son shopping at Addi Road Food Pantry. Her bags are bulging, the next ten days accounted for. She pulls out a small Spirax notebook, all the items and costs marked down in pen. It’s not just a shopping list, it’s a budget for their fortnight of meals and for the money she is saving. $30 here and there and there that can add up, if she shops carefully, to buy new school shoes for son in a month’s time while continuing to feed him. A hardworking single-mother running financially tight for the love of her son. He doesn’t just need those new shoes, she knows how he appears at school affects his sense of who he is and how his friends treat him. No, she does not want her son to be marked as a loser, let alone go hungry for a minute, even if she has to skip a meal or two herself.
Two: a middle-aged man in a farmer’s old RM Williams hat. He cleans up and helps repair things at a boarding house in Petersham. He shops at Addi Road Food Pantry for himself and takes home extras to share with eight other men. “Things are a lot better at the boarding house now,” he reckons, hinting at the drinking and madness that used to infect the place. He keeps the boarding house clean, sweeps the hall, fixes door locks, brings home the free fruit and vegetables and a few basics like bread and milk that he puts in a fridge which sits in their shared kitchen. The guys seem happier, less explosive, not so down. “It’s a good place now. We all get along.”
Three: a well-dressed woman in a nice car with two young daughters. Inside the Food Pantry we’ve been lucky that day. A local business donor has given us boutique ice creams that we have stored in our freezer. They are a very popular surprise item. Contrary to the belief that the poor must perpetually suffer, that no treat or joy can be justified, we do our best where possible to provide people with things that might bring a bit of light into their lives. “Look mum,” says one of the girls. “Ice cream. We can live like we used to before,”
These sad-beautiful stories could make for tearful moments in a Disney movie. Our volunteers at Addi Road Food Pantry encounter such stories all the time, along with unhappier and more difficult situations: poverty’s associated pandemics of family breakdown, increased rage and addiction, exacerbated depression and mental illness.
In the bleakest of moments, food on the table can be the line between making it through to a better day and what sociologists refer to as ‘deaths of despair’.
Addi Road’s habitat tree – home to local birdlife and an inspirational model for our children’s book, ‘The Hollow Tree’, a story of working in harmony with the environment and creatures finding a safe communal refuge in the city.
Individuals and families from right across the Inner West and the City of Sydney LGAs and suburbs much further afield… people of different backgrounds and classes (the unemployed, the working poor, and, increasingly, those who once thought of themselves as middle class and ‘comfortable’)… a wide demographic of ages, personality types and multicultural backgrounds… students, refugees, pensioners, musicians, artists, teachers, single parents… they all come to Addi Road to stabilise their lives and even improve things over time.
We keep going for them. And we find, to our surprise, that many return the favour, helping us out by spreading the word about our work and even signing up to volunteer – or through simpler human gestures, arriving in a good mood, sharing a random kindness with others as well as with us. In the process telling themselves as much as others that they are not alone.
This is how mental health can be slowly improved for individuals and for a community experiencing what we regard as a sociological form of slow-motion trauma.
It is also how go-to funding terms like ‘resilience’ and ‘social cohesion’ find ground in a shared and genuinely experienced local reality.
Our local Federal Member for Grayndler, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has often given his own anecdotal picture of the Inner West: speaking of it one of the most intensively multicultural and creatively populated (musicians, artists, writers, academics) places in the country, while acknowledging it has more boarding houses than any other electorate in Australia.
You only have to look at rampaging real estate prices for Sydney’s Inner West to see how much wealth and investment is in the area. So it goes that privilege and power, creativity and alternative thinking, student and multicultural life, tradition and change, and the intense and broken-down lives of the underclass and the homeless all rub up against one another.
In this closeness, we are a picture of Australia as it really is. A picture where Addi Road’s day-to-day life as a community centre allows us to engage with and appreciate what is visible – and what is too-often brushed aside or hidden. To quote Mr Albanese, in the best and worst spirit of this picture, “Addi Road is the heart of the Inner West”.
It’s sadly true that our Addi Road Food Pantry locations in Marrickville and Camperdown are often a place of last resort. People come to us hungry, confused, overwhelmed by what they are going through. Food is a gravity point for them to ask for other kinds of advice and help: where they might go to next, what to do about… their shoes, petrol, a bed, a blanket, their safety, anything? When you recommend another place of urgent care-and-response – and are told, ‘They said for us to try you here’ – you realise just how much your own work matters. As well as how thin the line is becoming.
We see people break down and cry because we have given them a $10 food voucher. Affording a box of food at one of our low-cost grocery stores – the two Addi Road Food Pantry set-ups at home-base in Marrickville and across at our sister-store on Pyrmont Road in Camperdown – can have the same emotional impact.
With every shop at one of our food pantries we give people additional free bread and free fruit and vegetables, operating on a principal that allows people to make their own choices while ensuring every shopper can still bring nutritious staples into their home. If they want to blow it all on soft drink and biscuits that’s their business – we just make sure they get the good stuff as a bonus. We don’t believe in running our food pantries as compulsory gruel-and-rice handout centres, dictating to people what they should get and do. Giving people some volition, as best as we can offer it, is another part of the empowering ethos behind the way we do ‘business’.
We’re lucky to have so many wonderful donors: those who help us financially (a substantial and important proportion being our many small donors) along with the local businesses who collaborate regularly or chip-in unexpectedly with food and supplies. By rescuing so much food locally, Addi Road also helps the environment and contributes to stopping the terrible waste that ends up in polluting landfill while continuing to better feed people. Our staff, vans, operating and organising costs… it adds up. We balance our budget as best we can, a community service combining low-cost shopping outlets with free food, events and hampers.
We also try to diversify the food we can offer in the pantries, adding to what we purchase from the larger food rescue charity organisations who supply smaller and mid-level groups like us. Yes, you read that right. Most smaller organisations pay the large charity and food supply groups for what they are ‘given’, transport costs and other transactional add-ons turning the issue of food relief into an industry, even if everyone is doing their best to run at cost and maintain the supply lines.
Thus our somewhat sarcastic allusions to ‘the hunger monopoly’. The phrase is a bite of the big hands that feed us as an organisation, and a jab at government big-idea funding that needs a review and a redirection of funding down along the proverbial food chain.
Thanks to some direct funding from the City of Sydney recently we’ve been able to skip over this top-down structure and develop our own three-year program for Camperdown. Beginning in late 2023 it’s called ‘Food Ecology in the City’. But unlike the electoral voting laws, we don’t draw a line down the middle of King Street in Newtown and say you can’t eat with us. We never turn people away, wherever they come from.
From our statewide #HampersofHope week held each Christmas to the outreach food delivery programs and the school meals and bbqs we do with the Sydney Swans, from the Addi Road Food Pantry grocery stores in Marrickville and Camperdown to our Wednesday Night Lights and all the food relief programs we offer to communities across the Inner West and throughout the City of Sydney LGA… our work goes forward and spreads outward.
Food on the table, food in the fridge. A good hot meal, now and then, for all who come to us. As we have already noted here a few times, this affects mental health as well as physical well-being and all manner of social connections. It strengthens people’s ability to fight on through to that imagined ‘better day’. And it restores dignity, sometimes in the most crucial of moments. Food relief – or what we call ‘food justice’ – being part of Addi Road’s program for every individual and what we still like to believe in as a community.
Wednesday Night Lights warming up on a winter’s evening at Addi Road in Marrickville