Hub’s emerging vision for food
Anew Wimmera-made food venture aims to provide affordable, healthy, locally-grown and sourced food options to the region’s migrant and youth communities.
It is the latest social-enterprise concept from the region’s change-making organisation, Centre for Participation in Horsham.
While the concept is in its infancy, the centre’s leaders hope to develop a self-sustaining enterprise that could bring to life the ideas of migrant and young people across the region, to create Wimmera-made food products.
Centre for Participation chief executive Robbie Millar said his team’s vision for the hub was to eventually grow, source and package, for sale, a variety of simple and affordable food products, inspired by multicultural food styles, that could encourage a ‘grow and buy local’ ethos.
Mr Millar said the venture was ‘part engagement, part education’, built from consultation with migrant and youth communities about their desire to access food products often unavailable in the Wimmera.
“Members of the migrant community travel weekly to Melbourne, Ballarat or Mildura to stock-up on food products they can’t buy in the region,” he said.
“We have an opportunity, with this hub, to grow or source products locally and package that into familyfriendly food purchase options.”
Mr Millar said the hub, with funding from the Victorian Department of Health’s Vichealth program, would also focus on reducing food waste and attempt to generate a circular product economy that gelled with aims of the centre’s other ventures.
“The hub would certainly work alongside, and make use of, our other ventures including the Laneway Café at Federation University TAFE, its meals-on-wheels and catering services, as well as its education initiatives, such as its microbusiness course,” he said.
Centre for Participation food hub manager Jules Del Real said the team was involved in early conversations with landowners about sourcing potential sites to grow product.
She said given the time it would take to grow fresh produce, there would be opportunities to source product in the interim.
She said it would be pertinent to tap into the region’s vast grain-growing capacity to repackage grain products in a new way, that could be sold at other Vichealth-partnered food-hub sites across Victoria, as well as at a future bricks-and-mortar food-hub shop in Horsham.
“We are rich in grains, pulses and chickpeas in the region, so we are considering how can we use that advantage to make the community healthier,” she said.
“There are also extensive social outcomes that might stem from the hub such as by plugging a gap in the unavailability of supermarket delivery across the region. The hub could work alongside the centre’s other ventures to deliver these products to people’s homes,” she said.
“These are factors that impact sections of the region’s vulnerable communities and the hub has an opportunity to make a social difference in a variety of ways.”
Mr Millar said the centre hoped to continue its consultation process with migrant and youth communities in the region, and to co-design the hub with their needs in mind.
“We have been engaging with young and migrant people for a while, to find out their potential purchasing habits and how to best support them get what they need from the hub. That co-design process will dictate how the hub grows,” he said.
“It is key for us to use existing assets in the community and build on the infrastructure, people and knowledge we already have access to across the region.”
Mr Millar said he encouraged people interested in participating in the hub’s consultation process to complete an expression of interest application for consideration as a member of the project’s advisory group.
He also encouraged migrant and youth communities to consider completing food questionnaires that could guide the concept.
The centre has also advertised employment vacancies for two food-hub enterprise assistants for people aged between 18 and 25.
Consultation initiatives are available at www.centreforparticipation.org.au