General News
13 June, 2025
Community house receives funding
Maryborough Community House Inc (MCH) has received $10,000 grant towards their Garden to Gourmet project, thanks to the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR).
MCH is one of 22 not-for-profits throughout rural Australia to receive funding for projects that celebrate, strengthen and support communities.
The Garden to Gourmet project will utilise the produce from their existing volunteer kitchen garden, in combination with food received from Foodshare through a partnered approach, to create wholesome and healthy, affordable meals.
MCH Activity Hub project officer Sue Miller welcomed the funding.
“This funding will help strengthen what we do throughout the house. It’s all run by volunteers. It will benefit those volunteers, it will benefit the house, and hopefully benefit the community,” she said.
Ms Miller said the project emerged during the pandemic, but engagement has continued since.
“The project has come about through sustainability and collaborative partnerships. We have been doing food parcels since COVID, and that has continued on even after, there has always been a need for it,” she said.
By combining much needed resources and produce from their own garden, the project came about from collaboration.
“We are a little bit constricted with what we can offer, so we get orders from Bendigo Foodshare, but there is certain availability. A lot of the times it might be big bags of just lentils. Nobody wants just lentils. So we look at it and go ‘how can we actually use this produce with our kitchen garden?’,” Ms Miller said.
“The cost of living is so high, even the things that used to be cheap are no longer cheap. So it became how to make good wholesome meals.
“We get this food sent to us, and we have our own, we can put it together and run a free cooking program and we can make up menus and shopping lists from the program so people can take them away and reproduce it in their own homes.”
The MCH Kitchen Garden ensures they have access to fresh, nutritious produce while reducing their carbon footprint.
MCH is hoping to use the funding to buy equipment for the storage and preparation of the meals.
“We are going to purchase a dehydrator because that is something that would help. We will also get an upright freezer, because we don’t have a lot of storage. If we are going to have ready made meals, it needs to be packaged properly,” Ms Miller said.
The funding will also provide food handling and supervisor training for volunteers, who will be assisting in the production of the meals.
Additionally, MCH plans to offer free cooking classes, which will include take home menus for the meals created.
Ms Miller said participants will learn new recipes, discover creative ways to use healthy ingredients and build friendships and networks over shared meals.
“This is going to be a big wow. It allows us to do some training and education, increase our equipment, which is needed, and hopefully people will take what they learn here into their homes,” she said.
MCH program coordinator Jeannie Clarke was also excited about the funding announcement and said it will support numerous components of the Garden to Gourmet program.
“We have our community cooking program, and we have just trained a number of our volunteers under that. It’s like train the trainer. Our volunteers can help other volunteers in healthy cooking,” she said.
“We are also going to be increasing the plants we are growing in our kitchen garden as well. Our kitchen garden has been a great staple for the house.
“It’s been able to be a demonstration point for the community with how to do wicking beds, how to grow your own food. We are really trying to encourage that as well.”
FRRR is the only national foundation specifically focussed on ensuring the social and economic strength of Australia’s remote, rural and regional communities. Established in 2000, it has since delivered more than $200 million to more than 15,000 projects.
