Three great Colour City community groups have banded together to provide hot meals this winter for hungry locals doing it tough.

With the cost-of-living crisis hitting increasing numbers of Australians and the colder months on the way, the initiative couldn’t have come at a better time.

The project involves Ashcroft IGA's Let's Make Better (LMB) charity successfully applying to the community grants program at Bank Orange to provide 40 hot meals each week via the St Vincent de Paul Society food service, Vinnies Van.

The near-$6000 in money follows a hugely popular trial last year of the program that was almost too successful, Vinnies Van coordinator Keith Dowling revealed.

“Ashcroft’s have supported us for a long time and, last year, the suggestion was made that they come on board with some hot meals,” Keith explained.

“So, last winter, we had 10 hot meals a night, and soups as well, and they went very well, absolutely… we received frozen meals from them, heated them, and kept them piping hot in an oven,” he added.

The meals are distributed via the familiar and welcome route that the Vinnies Van makes through some of our less-prosperous neighbourhoods and suburbs, with the $6000 buying 880 hot meals between May and September, to supplement the usual sandwiches and hot drinks.

“We go out Monday and Wednesday nights and stop at five locations for about 20 minutes at each place,” Keith said.

“The service is very popular, it’s very rare we have any left-overs, but if we do, they go to Foodcare… but we don’t anticipate that with the hot meals, they were very popular last year,” he concluded.

The new money is a wonderful contribution to the good work that LMB already does for the local food service, Rochelle Ashcroft said.

“We asked for and got $5940 from the community grants program at Bank Orange, and it just came through,” she excitedly told Orange City Life.

“We already donate $8000 a year to the Vinnies food van with things like bread and barbecued chickens and, last year, we decided to do hot meals also,” she added.

While most welcome by their clients, the new service was, however, fast draining the funds already allocated for other items on offer.

“It was then we decided to make an application to Bank Orange, and they came to the party,” Rochelle said.

“It’s very exciting, we’re over the moon and so are Vinnies, we’ve been helping them out for a number of years, and this is just great,” she concluded.

The grant is a central component of the locally-owned and run financial institution’s service role, Bank Orange’s Marketing and Product Manager Tayla Harvey explained.

“We’re a non-profit community bank and we don’t make a profit, so the grants program is a way of giving back to that community,” Tayla said.

“We normally offer grants in total of roughly $25–30,000 each financial year, so this was certainly one of our bigger ones,” she added.

Recent change to their grants program from an annual to a regular basis, has made the program far more responsive to local community needs, she believes.

“I think so, we decided to make it monthly rather than yearly, so that community groups don’t need to rush in an application by a certain date,” Tayla said.

“Also, no one really knows what they might need as the year goes on, this is a much more flexible and responsive way of doing it,” she concluded.