What we found in the dirt — one year of Moving Feast.

This year our state has been brought to its knees again and again – first by enduring drought, followed by apocalyptic firestorms and then by a pandemic and global economic collapse. Within weeks of the pandemic starting STREAT, the hospitality social enterprise that I’ve spent a decade building paused its youth training programs as our city cafes started closing one by one. Many of our social enterprise peers were also brought to their knees. But whilst we were on our knees in the dirt, we started planting some tiny seeds together – literally and figuratively.

Our first seeds – batches of culturally-appropriate meals and produce boxes into the food relief system – sprouted rapidly like microgreens and gave us a quick hit of flavour and nutrition and a desire to do more planting. Next, we started planting more diverse veggie crops, toiling side by side with a handful of social enterprises across a whole season together.

Our collective harvests nourished not only thousands of people facing food insecurity, but also the scores of people within our social enterprises.

Collectively we built the first phase of Moving Feast, a system innovation project catalysed by the social enterprise sector to build a healthy, fair and regenerative food system for Victoria. Now we hunger for more.

We’re ready to move beyond pandemic food relief to build an ‘ecosystem of solutions’ to create transformative food system change. We have started to plant a bountiful foodscape, with audacious flagship projects being like our tall productive trees. Lower in the canopy are a host of smaller interlinked projects providing opportunities for collaboration between new partners, creating new systems and processes to link our work, cross-pollination of ideas and knowledge, bringing new people to the table, and hopefully some fresh new approaches to some enduring problems. We also plan to scatter seeds on the wind, allowing emergent work and innovations to spring up and surprise us.

We are not striving for a vast monoculture crop in long rigid rows. Instead, we’ll be re-wilding a concrete landscape, scattering seeds on the breeze, hoping some roots will probe the tiny cracks in the pavement, some stems will bend and stretch in search of sunlight. We know that not all plants will survive or thrive. We expect our garden to be surprising. Tiring. Joyous. Baffling. Hopeful. Beautiful. And hopefully also bountiful.

Rebecca Scott, OAM — STREAT Co-founder and CEO, and Moving Feast Coordinator

Here’s a taste of our collective’s work in 2020