General News
5 September, 2025
Grant supports food access
Maryborough’s Mill House has received almost $10,000 of funding to improve their community food shed.
The local community organisation was awarded $9,579, among 28 not-for-profits across the state sharing $355,000, all supported by Foundation for Rural Regional Renewal’s (FRRR) Strengthening Rural Communities program.
FRRR’s flagship program supports small remote, rural and regional communities with funds which will directly benefit their local community.
Mill House has been the grateful recipient of this funding in numerous other rounds which has helped them support local residents — particularly through their food programs such as the Thursday Market and Friday Feast.
While their food relief program helps many vulnerable local residents, its produce is stored in an uninsulated garden shed.
It means in summer when produce from Food Bank and Food Share arrives on a Wednesday, former Mill House coordinator Michelle Baker explained, it will have gone mouldy by the market on Thursday.
“You could have bags of carrots and, by the time you’d come in on Thursday morning, in the middle of summer the carrots had gone mouldy,” she said.
The heat meant their handful of fridges had to work harder and volunteers, when inside the shed to get food, would feel ill from the heat.
“It is unbelievable, it is like an oven out there,” she said.
The funding will pay for insulation and seal the shed, keeping it cool and more hygienic, with whirlybirds to help circulate air.
“We thought that would be something that could really support us to continue doing the market longer term,” she said.
It’s an exciting prospect for Mill House’s new coordinator Sarah McLean.
“We have probably 30 to 40 people a week come through and get fresh produce so the longer we can keep it fresh, the more people we can make sure it gets to,” she said.
“Nutrition-wise it’s benefitting a lot of people.”
According to the 2019 Active Living Census, only one in 10 adults eat the daily vegetable guideline, five or more serves a day, and one in two the daily fruit guideline, two serves a day.
The census also found one in seven of the shire’s households do not have enough to eat, with 16.3 percent of Maryborough households running out of food in the previous 12 months.
Ms McLean hopes the upgrade will help Mill House expand their food relief program to support more local residents.
“Hopefully with the new upgrades we can have more food and service more people which would be fabulous,” she said.
Mill House’s Thursday Market and Friday Feast are free, although a donation is encouraged, with the organisation’s coordinators former and new encouraging residents to come along.
It’s a service Ms Baker was thrilled to have FRRR’s endorse-ment of.
“We’ve just been so wrapped they’ve supported us, endorsed our projects, and see the value in what we do because they wouldn’t give you the money if they didn’t,” she said.