The Grenfell Food Hall will be celebrating 10 years of service to the Community on Friday, 8 May. The Food Hall opened on 6 May, 2016 with Kath Smith OAM cutting the ribbon and declaring the Food Hall open. We opened at the Anglican Church Memorial Hall which was approved and attended weekly by Father Bob then Rev. Ross Craven. We started with 43 Volunteers rostered to work weekly or monthly and thank you to all of you for the work you did. Then Covid hit and everything changed. We closed our doors but put in new plans and procedures to still be able to help people especially at this time. We followed the Presbyterian Health rules for Covid. We then went to having customers place their order via Facebook, phone or by email and this worked well. We packed the orders on Mondays and delivered them to people’s homes on Friday and with no face-to-face contact. We packed up to 80 orders and thank you to our drivers for delivering them. We had to scale down our volunteers and we had 13 all dedicated to the Food Hall and we all worked well. All these same volunteers are still with us today. Then finally, we were able to re-open the hall to a lot of very happy customers, although some Covid rules remained. It was a happy day when we could re-start our morning tea a bit later. In August, 2020 we moved from the Anglican Church hall to the Presbyterian Church hall which was more suitable to our needs. The Food Hall is now located at the Uniting Church. Today we have 80 to 100 customers each week and they come in with their partners and friends and children. Friday mornings are busy and are happy mornings along with a yummy morning tea for everyone to enjoy. Our 16 volunteers work constantly and it’s ‘’hats off’’ to everyone for the great work you all do. Thank you to the Uniting Church and the Presbyterian Church for the support they give and we must always be grateful and thankful to God for overseeing the Food Hall from the very beginning. We are very grateful to the early Pioneers of the Food Hall who saw the need to start a Food Hall up for Grenfell. They had their problems but worked hard until we opened the Food Hall in May, 2016. It was opened to Centrelink customers, but shortly after we saw the need for everyone to be able to get some assistance and opened it up to everybody and whether you live within the Weddin Shire or anywhere else in Australia you are very welcome to come and purchase food and enjoy a free morning tea and catch up with friends or make new friends. We pray it will continue for many years serving our Community. A huge thank you to all the wonderful volunteers and it’s indeed a pleasure to come into the Food Hall. We invite anyone who would like to come in and see all the goodies we have and enjoy the morning on Friday, 8 May to celebrate 10 years. And thank you to all our customers who continue to come in each Friday.
