Ballarat, Australia: the Food Is Free Laneway (or at least it should be…)

My friend who lives in town took me to the Food is Free laneway, a food security group in her hometown of Ballarat that believes that food should be free for people in need, and that the community should work together to make that happen. It’s a small grass roots not for profit oraganization built entirely from volunteer efforts of locals in the community.

I found this YouTube video on the topic

According to my friend the locals in town are in something of a struggle with the council because the locals want there to be free food available all around the city, and the council doesn’t. This is true to the extent that the council has actually been cutting down fruit bearing trees around town where people would just stop and grab some fruit when it was ripe, including (I think it was) a fig tree near a roundabout.

[NOTE: That said, I’m writing this blog post well AFTER my visit. I was at the Food is Free Laneway about 5 months ago, on Feb. 2nd, 2018, and since my accident only about a week before then had resulted in a sever concussion …  I just haven’t gotten around to writing about it till now.  The accident made it impossible to focus my brain the way I needed to in order to blog, and as such I fell woefully behind on the posts the Australia trip … but as I’m currently holed up in the Chicago area (i.e., my home base) doing things like doctor’s visits — including some related to the post concussive syndrome which I am STILL suffering from (albeit very mildly at this point, thankfully) and the fact that I hit the ground so hard that I dislocated my jaw (requiring some expensive visits to my dentist who is trying to fix the damage) —  I am taking the opportunity of being back on my home turf to rectify that lapse.]

At the same time, she told me that the organization was expanding their growing space into a piece of land that the city has given them, which this article confirms.

The Food is free group is pretty active with the social media options, they have their own Facebook page group, to help them keep organized locally, as well as an instagram group.