The Australian social enterprise offering shared food experiences from around the world as a way to give refugees the chance to ‘create their own future’
- Free to Feed is a Melbourne NGO that provides refugees with training for work in the food industry and the chance to cook food from their homeland for customers
- We attend a Free to Feed food event to sample dishes from Ethiopia to Lebanon to Egypt, and talk to the founder about the impact her organisation is having
“When I think about the refugee journey of fleeing, usually after persecution or conflict, I see that as a period of a really long winter,” says Loretta Bolotin, founder and chief executive of Australian social enterprise Free to Feed.
“That’s what we hear from those we support: it’s a winter that sometimes feels like it doesn’t have any hope.”
Bolotin’s non-profit organisation aims to give hope by empowering refugees and people seeking asylum through the provision of training for work in the food industry, and work opportunities centred around shared food experiences.
Dating from the late 1930s, the building that houses Free to Feed’s space has art deco features, including a central tower of curved vertical fins rising above the roof line. However, it’s had some of its gloss knocked off.
The tops of those cream-coloured fins, as with some of the brown tiles lower down the building, bear graffiti, and the facade has some flaking cement render.