The Community Plate Action Group

The Community Plate Action Group

The Community Plate Action Group has officially launched

First meeting in mid 2021, a group of like minded locals came together to brainstorm how we could start working collectively to achieve our aspiration that ‘we are all connected to food that is local, healthy and abundant’.

A couple of planning meeting have been held from then until now and the group has landed on the following three action areas to focus its work initially:

1. Explore and promote creative and effective ways local community spaces (e.g. community houses) can share and access fresh healthy food
2. Maximise existing and explore set up of new Community Gardens & Food Forests
3. Increase capacity to obtain excess food for food relief initiatives (e.g. consider enhancing food relief services with student projects and mentor initiatives)

Our discussions have centred on mapping and exploring existing and creative ways local community houses/gardens/spaces already share food, and rather than create anything new, first we will look to:

  • explore how we can support these spaces to strengthen what already exists,
  • make what already exists more accessible,
  • explore the challenges of food sharing initiatives, and
  • explore opportunities where the Action Group can support these initiatives at a catchment level.
      This is the same for excess food relief… to map and explore the opportunities and challenges over the 90 day action plan.

    Our Chair

    The Action Group has recently appointed its first official Chair. Tanita Northcott is a local resident, keen to contribute to community initiatives that support and promote healthy, equitable and sustainable food systems in the regions. Tanita is a researcher completing her PhD at Deakin in Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. Her research focuses on understanding how law and regulation can be conceptualised and used to tackle the harms of ultra-processed foods from a ‘food systems’ perspective. She also holds a Juris Doctor from Melbourne Law School and a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from The University of Melbourne. Tanita has kindly offered her time to fulfil the Chair role for the next six months or so as we step into action.

    The Community Plate Action Group is an inclusive, open network of people and anyone with an interest in being involved is encouraged to join us. We currently meet monthly, in a Wednesday lunchtime timeslot. Meetings have been held online so far but we have hopes to meet in person for particular events soon. Beyond the monthly meetings it’s up to each member to choose how hands on they would like to be.

    If you would like to get involved in the action group please contact Nikki Hale at nhale@phcn.vic.gov.au.