Non-profit

Jo Murray is connecting her community

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Jo Murray welcoming people to the Surf Coast Repair Cafe                        photo by Charlotte Bowra

I met Jo through my old friend Sue Guinness. Jo and Sue got together about 20 years ago and since then, I’ve followed their personal journeys with interest.  Both left jobs in Melbourne, embarked on a sea-change and are very active in their local community at Fairhaven on Victoria’s Surf Coast.

Living by the sea has created opportunities for my environmentally conscious friends to be involved in conservation initiatives. Jo cultivates an enormous vegetable patch, is a member of the Community Garden and volunteers at the Tip Shop. With Sue’s support, she recently started a Repair Café.  I spoke with Jo about why she focuses on building awareness and practical initiatives in her community.

I love the outdoors. I was born in Launceston and spent the first nine years there and was lucky enough to have all of my grandparents in Launceston. We had, and still have, a block of land 18 miles out of Launceston that my grandparents bought.  It is a very tranquil, peaceful place on a river. We used to go there a lot on weekends. When we moved to Melbourne, I used to go there every Christmas and school holidays. I still go there to this day at least once or twice a year. I love the fact it’s a simple cottage and there’s not a lot to do; you just slow down, read and relax and spend time with family.

I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school. People were choosing to be nurses and teachers, or lawyers and doctors. We were all really sporty and someone said, ‘I’m going to do Physical Education’ and I thought, That’s a good idea. I taught for eight years and always organised all the sporting events and teams. Then I started organising the interschool sports and camps and found what I really enjoyed was organising events. I decided to do a Graduate Diploma in Business at Deakin University in Sport Management. I studied for two years with the aim of leaving teaching and getting into the event management industry.

Through my work, I learnt the value of volunteers. My first job after teaching was with a national sporting organisation. Then I joined a sports management company that ran events and managed athletes. I ended up at the Grand Prix and was there for the first six formula one events. That’s where I learnt how sport depends so much on volunteers. If all the sporting events had to pay people do to all the jobs that needed to be done, they wouldn’t exist.

I have always had great role models. Dad always volunteered at golf and school fairs, my grandmother was very involved in her bowls club and my mum’s parents were founding members of the National Trust in Tasmania. At school, I coached and umpired hockey and continued this at club level for many years. I also joined committees at my tennis club. These days, my sport volunteering is focussed around golf and local events.

I think building community is really important. A couple of our Repair Café volunteers are new to the area and they see this as a way of meeting people. When you see someone down the street who has repaired something for you, that creates connections. That’s the whole reason I joined the Community Garden about six and a half years ago. From the minute they had a stand at the local market, I wanted to be involved. I didn’t want a plot, because we have a huge garden at home. I wanted to get involved because it is a great way of connecting people and building community.

 Movements like Repair Cafes and Community Gardens have relied on people seeing the ideas and saying, ‘Let’s start these up in our own community.’ We can’t go on filling up landfill and digging more resources out of the ground. I think the best way to change that thinking is to bring national projects like Community Gardens, Plastic Free July or Repair Cafes to a local level. With something like the plastic bag free moment, it’s not something the shire can say ‘We want to make the shire plastic bag free,’ the whole community has to get on board. It’s about people going out to the rest of the community and saying, ‘We’d like to do this, what do you think?’ and getting other people involved. It’s got to be from the grass roots.

The Repair Café is about sharing skills and empowering people. These days, people don’t know how to fix things. Our hedge trimmer broke down. It only cost $79 and it was three years old, so even if I could have found somewhere to have it repaired, it would not have been worth the expense. We ended up taking it to the Melbourne Repair Café (Inner West) in Yarraville where we met this lovely volunteer, James. He unscrewed the plastic casing, straightened the cord out and jiggled a couple of levers, plugged it into the power and it worked. He got me to put it back together again so next time it stops working, I’ll be confident to repair it myself.

It’s about leading by example and educating others. My next thing is to focus on advocating for sustainable actions, starting small via our Community Garden with about 100 members. If we can raise awareness on one action each month, just focus on one thing and get that working, then work on another and then another, hopefully we can bring about permanent changes. Once others see how easy it is, then hopefully they will start making some of the changes too.

Visit Surf Coast Repair Café for more information.

© Matilda Bowra 2017

Russell Shields is seeking justice

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Food glorious food. We’ve never had such abundance or been more anxious about what we put in our mouths. When I’m wondering what to cook for my meat loving husband and my daughters who are vegetarian and vegan, I wonder, ‘How did it get this complicated?’

While many of us are deeply absorbed with what and how much we eat, there are people in our community going hungry.  I want to hear about positive food initiatives and was delighted when Russell Shields agreed to meet.

Russell helped found food rescue organisation SecondBite and, more recently, set up The Community Grocer to supply fresh food to people living in public housing estates in inner city Melbourne.  He also manages the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre’s (ASRC) Food Justice Truck (FJT). Over a tour of the ASRC and the FJT, I learned how Russell is harnessing community, collaboration and social enterprise to address food insecurity for vulnerable populations.

Russell Shields in front of the Food Justice Truck       Photo by Charlotte Bowra

Seeing my parents working in a service industry had a big impact on me. My parents have always had food businesses. Seeing them as business owners, creating enterprises and working for themselves all their lives certainly had an influence on my career.  During primary school, I grew up in regional Victoria in a very small town called Mangalore on the old Hume Hwy.  My parents owned a road house – that was my first foray into food as a business. We moved to the city when I was in grade six and bought a milk bar in Camberwell. I remember stocking fridges, squashing boxes and doing whatever needed to be done. A lot of my life was around customer service. You are always thinking of other people and looking at how you can provide the best service.

Owning my own restaurant didn’t fulfil me. I spent a lot of years working in restaurants and cafes, particularly in fine dining in Australia and overseas. Owning your own restaurant is a kind of end goal for a lot of people working in hospitality, and when I came back to Australia with my English partner Katy, we bought a little café bar in Bourke Street, but it wasn’t satisfying. After that I was a little bit stuck about what the next path would be. I ended up teaching hospitality at Swinburne University. I really enjoyed that, even though it was short lived. While I was there, I saw the job for SecondBite and ended up working with Katy there as their second employee. It was a time in my life when I went against all the advice of friends and colleagues – it just felt right.

I made the decision to do something I believe in that had more purpose. It turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done through what I have been able to learn, how I’ve been able to grow in a professional capacity, and the individuals and communities that I have been fortunate enough to meet. I have never looked back. It felt natural and the right thing to do when we have so many challenges in our food system.

In Australia, we produce enough food to feed 60 million people, three times what we need, but we throw out a third of everything we produce. We have the food, but not everybody has access to it. I still can’t come to terms with how running alongside this amazing food culture in Melbourne is this incredible missing out. We have dozens of soup vans that go out every night and thousands of people across Melbourne who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, who are living side by side with people who are obsessed and overindulged with food. So how do we ensure every person has access to this wonderful produce we grow in Australia?

Food is a central, powerful theme for positive connection and positive social change. When I left SecondBite, I thought ‘How can we directly access individuals in need and do it through a model that can be self-sustaining financially?’ That’s when I set up The Community Grocer and we had our first market in Carlton in late 2014. Then I saw the FJT job . I had read all the evidence and was aware that ninety percent of people seeking asylum ran out of food last year and were unable to buy more. It made sense having just set up The Community Grocer, that I could transfer those skills and help the ARSC meet the challenge of helping more people.

The key barriers to a healthy, affordable and accessible diet are financial and physical access to food. For all food choices, finance is the number one driver. For people seeking asylum, we offer a significant 75% discount so that breaks down the financial access. The physical access issue is broken by taking locally sourced, fresh food into the communities we exist to serve. It is open and accessible to everyone. Our customers like the fact that we are promoting a strong social message; simply by shopping at the truck, you are supporting us to offer people seeking asylum access to the same food that you have.

Food is dignity. As a community, we have a responsibility to provide healthy food for the most vulnerable people, particularly people seeking asylum. If the government is taking away their choice to be able to provide for themselves, then we as a community have to ensure the choices we provide them are healthy, nutritious and dignified. It’s about everybody having that basic human right of access to the food that provides them with their cultural and dietary preferences.

I can jump on my high horse all I like and try and do things, but collectively we can achieve so much more. Collaboration can be a real challenge. Often people have the same end goal, but very different methods for getting there. Surely if you have the same goal, you can work together, leave your ego at the door and be open to other people’s opinions and listen. I know I don’t have all the answers to a better food system. I know the community I aim to support have the answers, and if they are empowered and provided the opportunity, then the answers will come.

Visit the Food Justice Truck  to learn more.

© Matilda Bowra 2017

Damien Mander is on a mission to protect animals

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Damien Mander with an orphaned nyala                       Photo by Andrew Craig

 We all come to forks in the road. What matters is what we do when we reach them.

Damien Mander has worked in the navy, toured Iraq 12 times as a private military contractor and travelled the world, but the biggest journey he has taken is inside himself.  After travelling to Africa and witnessing the effects of poaching, Damien decided he couldn’t return to his previous life. He took a different path, one which led him to setting up and running the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF).

I was intrigued to find out why Damien chose a difficult route. What I found was a man disarmingly honest about his life choices, his motivations for change and his journey from mercenary to a vegan animal activist.

I’ve got salt water running through my veins. I grew up initially in the Northern Beaches in NSW. Dad ran the Mona Vale Hotel so I lived there for the first nine years of my life, then we moved down to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. We were always on the beach.  I used to get up early and ride my bike down to the pier. I’d go free diving and collect all the fishing lures and the squid jigs that had been lost overnight by the fishermen and sell them back to them. I started diving off piers when I was 13. I’d be down there rain, hail or shine trying to make a dollar. I used the money to pay for my own scuba diving equipment and got right into scuba diving, which gave me the ambition to join the navy as a clearance diver.

Until I started doing what I’m doing now, I was a selfish person. I didn’t join the military to serve my country, I joined the military because it was a challenging job. I was also very self-conscious of image growing up. I don’t know why, just a testosterone fuelled teenager always interested in trying to impress other people. It was the same when I went across from the navy to the army to special operations. It wasn’t because I wanted to be part of a national response team to terrorists on home soil, it was because it was the next challenge, and again it was about me and nothing else. I suppose I was trying to create this image of being a touch guy, being a person in control, being a person who is not scared of anything. I went to Africa with the same mindset.

When I saw what the rangers in Southern Africa had to go through and realised I was trying to have an adventure on the back of their hard work and dedication, that was probably the lowest point in my life. I went over there to spend six months running around in the bush doing something I thought would be cool. I saw rangers who were living away from their families for up to 11 months of the year for a minimal salary, risking their lives every day to protect animals. I don’t know why, but seeing what happens to these animals affected me in a way that was worse than what I’d experienced in Iraq.

 I called bullshit on myself: “You are full-of-shit as a person, everything you do is about yourself and nothing else,” and put my money where my moral mouth is. I decided to give up a comfortable life of travel and holidays. I didn’t have to work again for the foreseeable future. I had money and a property portfolio and a certain skillset that is unfortunately required to look after animals. So I was left with a choice, “Do I turn my back on this? Or am I actually going to do something about it?”

 After what I’d been through in Iraq and my time in Africa I realised what real courage is and that is being honest with yourself. Every person has their own switch, for me it was seeing what was going on over there and acknowledging the truth. That’s not just in regard to setting up the IAPF, but also in terms of my veganism and the way I choose to speak out on behalf of all animals. We have sub-categorised animals into sexy ones and ones that are convenient for us to ignore. The suffering of a rhino is no different to the suffering of a cow, the only difference is the difference we allow ourselves to accept in our own minds because it’s more convenient for our conscience. There’s no ethical way to kill something that doesn’t want to die. If people want to eat meat, then they need to to understand the suffering that animal has been through to reach your dinner table.

 There are tens of thousands of animals in reserves that we look after, but it’s not just about protecting elephant and rhino, but everything those animals represent. We train local people, make sure they are well equipped to go out and risk their lives and give them a better chance of survival. I am now feel hopeful for the future. As our organisation has grown and the success we are having with our projects, that feeling of despair, has drifted away. Thanks to the support of our donors around the world, we are seeing very positive results on the front lines.

I want to be part of the last generation that has a negative impact on earth. I don’t know what our generation is going to have on our headstone, but I want to continue to be part of something that is positive. For me, helping animals and protecting nature is the greatest opportunity I’ve had.

Visit International Anti Poaching Foundation for more information.

© Matilda Bowra 2016