ARGENT Street welcomed a new shop in the Hope Café this week, though it is unique in that it doesn’t have anything for sale.
In a collaboration between Don Barron of Feeding Friends and The Astra’s David and Maryanne Trinder, Hope Café offers free goods donated by supermarkets, local business and the local community, to those in need.
The café, which opened on New Year’s Day, has everything from baked goods to bedding for anyone who is doing it rough.
Tough times are a concept Mr Barron, the founder of Feeding Friends, knows all too well, after spending years in jail serving a drug-trafficking sentence before fighting addiction upon his release.
“I struggled with addiction, and I ended up finding myself homeless in Adelaide Parklands,” Mr Barron said.
“So I came back home to Broken Hill, and my sister put me into a mental health place. After thirty days of being there I was clean and had obtained work two days a week and a flat of my own.”
Mr Barron met his now wife Kellie, and the two founded Feeding Friends together three years ago.
“One night I happened to be down at Outback Pizza, and I walked out with my pizza and saw a chap asleep on the kerb,” he said.
“He had no blanket, no pillow, so I walked over and introduced myself. We got talking about our lives and shared the pizza together.”
He told Kellie about this, and the next night the two cooked extra food for dinner to take some to his newfound friend.
“Kellie and I went out looking for him and we found a few other people, so we fed them all,” he said.
“And it grew and grew. It’s been three years now that every night of the week we’ve fed someone.”
About a year ago the responsibility started to become too much for the Barrons alone, and so David and Maryanne Trinder decided to come on board and work with Feeding Friends to create the Hope Café.
Ms Trinder said they’ve been working on the project behind the scenes for almost eighteen months now.
“We feed the homeless on a daily basis and we have amazing volunteers who take the food out,” she said.
Mr Trinder said he has a vision for the Hope Centre to one day become a space that allows locals to engage in conversations that might encourage them to find the help they need. Whether that be reaching out to a crisis line, the hospital, or even just finding connection in friendships.
He said finding funding opportunities will help to be able to grow the Hope Centre into a place that can accommodate a more multi-facted approach to caring for those experiencing it tough, through offering things like emergency accommodation.
“But we’re not waiting for funding to come before we fufil our purpose,” he said.
“We’re going to pursue our purpose, so we’ve just pulled this into shape with what we’ve got.”
Mr Barron said that volunteering his time to running the Hope Centre on Thursdays and Saturdays between 11am-2pm is a privilege.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.
“Everyone deserves a hot meal, and to feed their kids. Poverty is an awful thing. So if we can provide someone with a little hope, it certainly helps out.”
