Your fork in the road for STREAT trainees

On Monday when our first nine youth arrived at STREAT I gave them each a letter which read:

Dear Trainee,

A meal doesn’t have to be just a meal. It can be a way of getting nourishment. It can be a way of sharing and creating memories with friends and family. It can be a way for a community to gather together and pass on traditions. It can be a way to get skills and make a living.

Across your lifetime you’ll have over 80,000 meals.

So far I’ve eaten more than 40,000 of mine. Most of them I can’t remember. But a couple are life-changing.

One of them was a meal I had in December 2001 in Can Tho, a southern town in Vietnam. After the meal I met a homeless boy. Although I couldn’t change his situation I decided I could help change the situation of young people who were at risk of being homeless in Australia. This meal helped lead to the creation of STREAT.

There’s another meal I know will be memorable too. It’s the first one I’ll share with you and your classmates who are our first class at STREAT.

Across the next six months at STREAT we’ll prepare and share a whole bunch of meals together. Hopefully across this time you’ll experience how food can change the world – and you.

Enjoy your meals. They can trace your journey to new opportunities.

As the French would say, “Bon appétit!”

Bec

Yesterday STREAT served its first official meals to its first nine trainees. Now we also invite you to come and join us for a meal at Fed Square as one of our first customers. Our hope is that you will choose to make one of your life’s 80,000 meals life-changing for someone else too.