“I responded to a newspaper clipping in October 1990 and it was more a prompting of the heart. In those days the person who ran the Soup Kitchen was Don Ferguson and he put an ad in the paper. Eight or nine of us responded! He was 7 days a week but we started a roster where we did 3 days a week. So the role over 25 years has changed a lot. In the 90’s someone donated a bus so I did a whole lot of bus tours, people were getting on board with trips away and it was fantastic. We’ve changed venues a lot, we first opened at the Church of Christ, Lismore which is now La Vida restaurant and there was a kindergarten close by so there were concerns for children and they asked us to move on, not that anything happened but it’s just a natural concern that parents have, so fair enough.”
“We were actually a homeless soup kitchen for 3 months and we’d cook in our own homes and bring the meals down to Heritage Park. There’d be a van there with a gas stove and then we’d go down to the river and wash our dishes. It was quite an experience and a lot of outreaching with sandwiches and things. We then moved to the Police Boys Club in Dawson St. for a couple of years and we only had a small section of that so we had to serve the food in 2 sittings. People lined up waiting. We then had a paint warehouse become available to us in Union St and a lot of the people that were coming to us wanted to give back in return which still happens today, they get on board as volunteers so we went from 3 to 7 nights. We were open 12 hours a day in the late 90’s, 7 days a week and musicians would drop in and play, visiting people would drop in with gifts, bible study groups, visiting Doctor, counselling groups, a lot of activity and then it burnt down in 2001 unfortunately. After that we moved to The Gangers Hut in Nth Lismore which is owned by the railways, but we didn’t really have the facilities we needed.”
“We came here to the Winsome in 2009. It was always a dream of some of them and I used to think ‘Gosh your dreams are big’ but I prayed for them and it just came to fruition and it’s wonderful. The Federal government put in $200k, local council put in $120k and some others had put in a huge deposit.”
“Because of homelessness becoming such a huge ongoing problem we were always trying to help people get into caravan parks or get into hotels and now we can help them get into our accommodation which is really good. I also manage ‘Mazza House’ which has 7 bedrooms. It was named after a nun called Sister Margaret Mazza who has passed away but she worked with us for many years. We won a grant for $50k which we invested as a deposit and it eventually paid itself off and it now accommodates medium term accommodation people, it’s really good.”
“We serve up to 60 a day for meals. We do good food, meat and three vegetables. Locals donate like Daley’s Butcher, Blue Ribbon meats, Brads Butcher and Hutley Bros butcher, they all donate some form of meat and we are grateful for that.”
‘After 25 years do you ever feel like you’ve had enough or that you you don’t want to do this anymore?’…
“I have, yes and I’ve endeavoured to move on or go for a long holiday and it’s while I’ve been away my heartstrings pull me back, its like an alcoholic needing a fix. With all its ups and downs I just keep coming back. It’s a community that has been such a part of me. It embraces me and I embrace it! It’s like a long term relationship.”