Meals on the Move keeps rolling along with $2000 grant

Tailem Bend Community Centre has received a Flinders Rural and Remote Health community partnership grant to prepare and deliver home-cooked meals with fresh produce.

The $2000 grant will help pay for Meals on the Move, which delivers meals to community members across 35,000 square kilometres in six local government regions, including Murray Bridge.

CEO Tammy Shepherd said that the community centre had started the Meals on the Move project in response to recent changes in the Tailem Bend community.

“There’s been a huge increase in demand for emergency food relief,” she said.

Ms Shepherd also said that many people in Tailem were sleeping rough and needed more support.

“These people are desperately lonely, and it got significantly worse with COVID,” she said.

“(TBCC employee) Denise McLoughlin saw the great opportunity to help these people sleeping rough over Christmas and anyone else in the community.

“We gave them hampers and all they needed to make a beautiful Christmas lunch.”

“Two men we gave a Christmas hamper said, ‘we didn’t know anyone cared’.”

Ms Shepherd said that Meals on the Move was not trying to compete with Meals on Wheels but to complement it, such as through delivering meals on weekends.

TBCC used a minimum of five to seven fresh ingredients in their meals.

“We grow a lot of the produce here in the garden – zucchini, kale and spinach at the moment – whatever’s seasonal,” Ms Shepherd said.

The $2000 community partnership grant “enabled us to do those meals for Christmas, which is a lonely time for people,” she said.

“We were able to have an impact on people and make them feel valuable and important.”

Elspeth Radford, Flinders Rural and Remote Health SA’s community engagement and communication officer, said communities like Tailem Bend looked after the students who lived in them for about 11 months of the year.

“The grant’s for the health and wellbeing of our community,” she said.

“It’s a thanks for having our people in the community.”

• More information: Visit www.tbcc.org.au or phone 8572 3513.

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