We are taking a much needed break over the holidays and our office will be closed … but never fear, things are on here!

1. Grow Local, Cook Local - book in to these workshops in week 2 of the holidays down at the Alphington Community Farmgate Kitchen. A great activity for grandparents and primary school aged kids, parents and their children, all adults who’d like to make more of their home garden (and cook what they grow) … and teenagers! These workshops really will be suitable for all ages. Book here.

2. Lego Workshops - join Cat for Lego adventures. Drop your primary school aged children off for a couple of hours of creative fun on Thursday 1 July or Tuesday 6 July. Book here.

We’ll see you in the other side. Note that our programs will restart on Monday 12 July.

On Friday we were :

Admiring our new paving - thanks Mark and Mark from Pacific Australis Landscapes and Simon from Simon Ellis Landscape Architects for helping us make the most of our front garden space. It is well on the way to being transformed … and when the cubby and sandpit arrive, and the pergola is built it will be amazing!

Checking out the raised garden beds (our leafy 🥬 greens are flourishing). Next term we’ll have the expertise of Katrina from Buzz and Dig in our garden for three hours on a Friday morning. She’ll be here directing the traffic, running garden-based community activities and building up expertise in our Gardening Group (if you are keen to help out and learn about seasonal gardening come along).

Restocking our street book library. It’s packed to the rafters!

Painting. Barb loves painting orange phones! Krystal uses colour beautifully. Our Friday Community Art and Craft sessions are open for anyone to come along and follow their creative interests in a friendly environment.

Cooking. Those medlars that had been bletting for a month were finally turned into medlar jelly this week! And Preserves Group also embarked on a new multi-week project making indian lime pickles …

Medlar jelly - what a beautiful colour!

Restocking our free masks. We had some leftover from the lockdown last year (made by the lovely CWA ladies and others) and we’ve had them available through the last lockdown - for anyone in the community who needs one. There are lots of gorgeous fabrics to choose from!

At Alphington Community Centre we have been working with the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre for may years now.

I can remember when the Fairfield Girl Guides Hall was still around, and I used to drop my darlings off there for dancing and the ASRC volunteer was also there each week to accept community donations.

When the Guides Hall was demolished, Becca invited that volunteer, the ‘old Andy’ (that is, the person back then who did the role that Andy does now) to park out the front of ACC, so he could come in and use the loos, and have a coffee … and feel like he had a home base again. And she provided a storage location so that non-perishable food could be dropped off throughout the week. And this is how ACC became a formal ASRC donation site.

That was probably 8 or 9 years ago I’d guess. And here we are today. Still doing the same thing.

There are lots of kind-hearted and generous people and organisations in our community who recognise that anyone who has had to flee their homeland must have seen tragedy and experienced hardship beyond our imagining - and also realise that asylum seekers in Australia are now stuck in an impossible situation, unsure of where they stand, unable to work and also without a government safety net for all the basics. So they take the time to regularly shop for them, and provide them with a bag of rice (and compassion) or shampoo and conditioner (and love) tins of tuna (and hope) or jar of honey (and care).

If you too would like make life a little easier for someone who is struggling in a sea of uncertainty, you can drop off non-perishable foods with us inside any time we are open. After hours (or in lockdown) you can leave donations in the dark grey roller door shed just inside our back garden. And Andy is here on Thursdays from 10am -12pm so you can also drop off perishable food then (like fresh fruit and vegies etc.). He’ll then take the whole lot over to the ASRC in Footscray for distribution.

If you are wondering what to donate, think about what you purchase each time you’re at the supermarket for your family - rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes and legumes, breakfast cereal, tinned tuna, peanut butter, honey, olive oil, herbs and spices, coffee and tea, toiletries etc. These basic staples that enable you to cook nutritious food for your family and keep clean and tidy are just the things that these families are wanting in their cupboards too.

To find out more about the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre click here.

By now we hope you have wandered past ACC on your daily walk and noticed the new art on our fence in the Alphington Neighbourhood Gallery.

If not, you should! The artist we are featuring this month is local Steph Briggs. The works on the fence include illustrations from a book that documented lots of familiar scenes from 2020, called ‘The year we stayed at home’. She also has some delicate sketches of houses from the neighbourhood and beyond (some done on commission if you are interested in documenting your own lovely house).

You can find out more about Steph here.

This community arts initiative is supported by Yarra City Council (thanks!).

Steph’s fur baby Leo is one of the stars of the exhibition.

Steph, Leo and Angus popped past on their lockdown walk to check it out.

Last year we made a little rhyming series of animated pictures (GIFS) with some funding from the Community Bank on Queens Parade … and then put them together with a voice over … and turned them into a poster that loads of locals collected from ACC on their daily neighbourhood walk.

It seems timely to pull them out again.

Here are the GIFS.

Here is the poster (we trust it is still gracing many a fridge or toilet door around the neighbourhood).

And here is the animation with voice overs if you’d like to watch it (it is pretty cute!).