My name is Lydia Graham. My sister Victoria (Buchla) Rasekaba and I started the charity West Melbourne Help in late March, in response to the Covid-19 crisis. We were so concerned about the fact that people were losing their jobs and would be out of money, especially International Students who were not receiving any government support.
We started asking at church (Spotswood SDA Church) for food donations and then spotted some posts on ADRA’s Facebook page about how they were looking for volunteers. These volunteers were needed mainly in the Eastern suburbs but we felt we had to do something in the West.
We found out about Northpoint Centre Food Pantry in Tullamarine and spoke to Leslie Baul, asking if they could support us. Northpoint Centre is supported by ADRA (you can read more about it here) and its Sunshine food hub has had to close due to Covid-19.
We began to post on community Facebook pages and Melbourne Covid Facebook Support pages looking for people who needed support and slowly but surely people began to come out of the woodwork asking for help.
Victoria set up the Facebook page West Melbourne Help to make things run more smoothly and with the support of community food donations, church members’ donations and financial donations we were able to start up and start delivering food parcels as well as fruit and vegetables supplied by Northpoint Centre Food Pantry.
Since then we have been delivering to about fifty mainly students at least a fortnight of groceries per week and have regular clients now, but we are getting new clients all the time.
The students are mainly Filipino, Nepalese and Indian and all have lost their jobs and have been living on the bare minimum, scraping by. Even if they are only working a few hours a week we encourage them to keep that money to pay their rent or their tuition and tell them that we will support them until they can get back on their feet.
We have to regularly put out appeals on social media and run donation drives as well as appeal to local businesses for food donations to ensure we can feed everyone. We even have drop off boxes out the front of our houses!
Supplies are becoming less available at the Northpoint hub as there is more need in the community, and the supermarket chains are having less to donate to them. But with God‘s blessing we always seem to have enough money or donations every week to be able to get food out to everybody.
We are so grateful to the members of our church community, our local communities and the greater community as well as Northpoint food hub and particularly Pastor Brian Lawty for his unwavering support of our endeavours.
We ask for the blessing of the Holy Spirit to continue to support these people until this crisis is over.
Lydia Graham and Victoria Buchla
If you would like to help meet this need in our city’s West, you can donate to the following account, set up through the Conference Office.
Acct Name: Seventh-Adventist Church; BSB: 032000; Account number: 837333; Reference: 10107100
(It is vital to write reference number correctly, to identify which account the transaction is going to).
Please email your donation details to Victoria at [email protected] and a receipt will be organised and sent to you.
