SHIFT | The Healthy Lunch Kitchen.
The SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen is a social enterprise that is ‘reimagining’ school lunches with school communities and nourishing meals for the community.
The Healthy Lunch Kitchen commenced in March 2021. To date, and even amidst COVID – school closures have delivered over 10,000 healthy lunch and snack orders, to over 1000 students from six local schools in regional Victoria. EXCITING NEWS: In 2025 Health Futures Australia has received start-up funding from VicHealth, Growing Healthy Communities Grants, to scale our social enterprise to provide nutritious school lunches to children in Ballarat, Victoria.
The kitchen commenced in March 2021 and experienced lots of stoppages in the first 18 months due to ongoing COVID lockdowns but still managed to develop as a prototype social enterprise for delivery of affordable and nutritious school lunches for the community. The Kitchen delivered to 6 schools in the Hepburn Shire in Victoria, showing promise as a new way to deliver sustainable school lunches and build a local healthy food system. We also provided weekly nourishing family and community take home meals, and a workplace lunch service to support our revenue, and community impact.
As the Healthy Lunch kitchen is currently expanding and moving to a new base from which to operate and service a much larger population in Ballarat, we are developing a new funding model and require fundraising support especially in our first two years to develop the business. Please email engage@healthfutures.org.au if you are able to assist.
SHIFT Cooking School for Health and Wellbeing
As part of the Healthy Lunch Kitchen we are delivering a Cooking School for Health and Wellbeing. The school offers cooking classes for the community on a wide range of topics like “Cooking on a Budget”, “Cooking for Sustainability”, “Cooking is Culture”, and “Kids in the Kitchen”. Twelve classes have been designed based on community input.
The program has been designed by Masters of Dietetics students from Monash University using the best available evidence, and based on use of seasonal, local produce. The classes aim to re-connect people around the love of cooking and eating nourishing food.
We will be running classes from 2025 for the communities of Ballarat, Clunes, Creswick, Hepburn, Daylesford and Trentham in Central Victoria.
This big vision is of a larger Healthy Lunch Kitchen operating out of a purpose-built facility which also contains fish and vegetable production via aquaponics, and is powered by organic food matter into biogas.
The entire SHIFT enterprise then becomes a place for agriculture, aquaculture, and commercial cooking, learning and training. This will bring enormous economic and social benefits to communities searching for bold interventions that impact their very fabric and quality of life.
Farmers will receive fair prices for their produce and we will open new sales channels for them that are local and sustainable. Fresh and affordable produce boxes will be developed for families.
SHIFT will create new jobs, reduce waste and food miles, establish new learning pathways and job opportunities for youth, and educate about healthier food choices and accessibility, all while ensuring that every school student has access to a healthy, nutritious lunch during the school day.
Demand is increasing, and other schools are already registering their interest to come on board.
Thanks to our donors, sponsors and corporate partners.
The SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen would not be possible without the support of our generous donors, supporters and corporate partners.
If you would like to support the continued development and implementation of the SHIFT Healthy Lunch Kitchen please see our fundraising page or contact us.
We would like to acknowledge and give special thanks to local supporters who are helping bring the Healthy Lunch Kitchen to life via their kind donations of kitchen equipment, produce and funding.