Canteens area supervisor Felicity Ayodele, Woden Community Service business performance manager Gavan Fairclough and Alfred Deakin canteen assistant Ingrid Uelese on duty at Alfred Deakin High School. Photo: WCS.
Woden Community Service (WCS) has taken on the ACT chapter of the Healthy Kids Association canteen service, now titled Canteens 4 Kids ACT.
It means children from 22 ACT schools (and counting) will continue to receive a service vital to their well-being and education while providing employment opportunities for vulnerable people.
The move is a significant step for WCS’s social enterprise arm, creating an opportunity for the organisation to engage its social enterprise catering service Pulse Catering to contribute to the Canteens 4 Kids ACT effort.
“We’re always seeking opportunities to broaden our social impact across Canberra,” WCS business manager Gavan Fairclough says.
“Expanding into schools has allowed WCS to enhance the impact of our social enterprise. We are excited about the potential this provides to create sustainable, community-focused services that benefit both the students and their families.
“We work with vulnerable people with inherent barriers to accessing employment opportunities, to build their skills in our programs and hopefully connect them with pathways beyond that.”
The WCS acquisition of Canteen 4 Kids ACT comes at a crucial time as ACT families grapple with the cost of living crisis.
Gavan says this is undoubtedly one of the reasons that less than 18 per cent of canteens are run by a Parent and Citizens Association (P&C), as has been the traditional method of maintaining viability.
“It makes sense that a local organisation takes over to ensure continuity of the service to local schools because we have oversight on where the opportunities lie to make this more accessible to people,” he says.
After just one term of operating Canteens 4 Kids ACT, WCS has received another five requests from schools asking to be added to the service.
Currently, WCS operates from 10 hub sites – five high schools and five primary schools – where they produce all the food before it’s distributed to schools across Tuggeranong, Gungahlin, the inner-south, the inner-north, Weston Creek and Molonglo Valley.
The menus are governed by the ACT Government’s traffic light system, which was developed in accordance with the National Healthy School Canteens guidelines.
“This is another way we can increase our social impact in the community, by providing healthy food to students, which we know means better outcomes for their education, and therefore their lives,” Gavan says.
For more information, contact Woden Community Service.
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