Emergency Food Relief
The Big Umbrella is dedicated to offering essential food relief to the wider community through its three core ongoing initiatives. Our primary service, Feed Melbourne, is held twice weekly at Federation Square. The Big Umbrella Disaster Relief Team (DRT) responds to natural disasters by offering food aid as required. Additionally, The Big Umbrella extends its outreach to the local community through our Family Table and A Real Meal Brunswick service.
TBU is dedicated to offering hot, nutritious meals in crises wherever they arise and can be mobilized with a full crew and equipment within 24 hours of an emergency in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.
Feed Melbourne
Started in 2010, Feed Melbourne stands for A Real Meal and that is exactly what we offer our friends on the street at our free pop up family style restaurant behind Federation Square. For each dinner service, we offer over 20 delicious, nutritious options of hot, cold, sweet and savoury dishes catering to dietary requirements and cultural sensitivities. Guided by our Head Chef, our meals are made with love using rescued food by our family of TBU volunteers and corporate teams in MG’s Kitchen during the afternoon. Feed Melbourne brings people together in a safe and inclusive space where everyone is welcome, no questions asked. Our volunteers and corporate guests do far more than just offer food; they sit down and dine with our friends, engaging in warm and fun conversations. TBU calls this ‘time caring’ and in a world currently experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and disconnection, we see creating a community of kindness just as important as feeding people.
Feed Melbourne is committed to reducing food waste, alleviating food insecurity and combatting loneliness while engaging community volunteers and corporate participation through their Corporate Social Responsibility programs (CSR).
Disaster Relief Team (DRT)
In response to the devastating 2015 Nepal earthquake, TBU initiated it’s first emergency response, which lead to delivering ongoing emergency relief services. In 2019, after the wildfires in VIC and NSW, TBU DRT was formally established. The TBU Food Truck was mobilized within days and stationed for weeks, providing thousands of much needed hot meals for people living in evacuation centres and first responders.
Since then, TBU DRT has provided food for crisis accommodation during the 111 straight days of the COVID-19 pandemic hard lockdown, amounting to over 47,000 freshly cooked nutritious meals, snacks and breakfast items.
Storms in June 2021 in the Dandenongs and Yarra Ranges saw mass destruction and households cut off from power for up to 6 weeks. The Food Truck and DRT relocated to Kalorama for three weeks, cooking hunderds of hot meals each day providing a space for the community to come together to heal and help each other.
February 2022 saw the worst flooding on record in NSW and despite being 1,560 kilometres away, the DRT team were the first to offer hot meals to the emergency accommodation. DRT remained there for two months, feeding families who had lost everything. Over 15,000 meals were served during this time and 6.5 tonnes of aid relief was handed out to the local community.
In September 2022, TBU provided 100s of culturally appropriate cooked meals for the relief centres dealing with people displaced from the Shepperton floods.
A Real Meal Brunswick
TBU moved to vibrant and exciting Brunswick in Merri-Bek Council, opening our TBU Emergency Relief Centre in April 2021. Once the Covid 19 pandemic settled, we wanted to add to our ARM and DRT food aid operations and connect directly with our local friends experiencing food insecurity. Feed Melbourne was created specifically to cater for the needs of our diverse and multicultural local community. Strewn with festive lights, we made a vacant space opposite the Town Hall on Sydney Rd come alive on Monday nights. The TBU crew of dedicated volunteers set up a dine-in and takeaway evening meal model with a free supermarket for our friends in need. Quickly, the nights grew until a long line of eager guests greeted our big pink van as we arrived. The atmosphere was fun, warm, family friendly and renowned by women and young people for being the most welcoming and safe free food offering in town.
A Real Meal Brunswick ran for 20 consecutive weeks until sadly due to funding issues, the service was temporarily suspended pending us finding a new sponsor to bring back this much needed and greatly loved offering to the community.
Please get in touch with us – victoria@thebigumbrella.org if you wish to support Feed Melbourne.
