An extraordinary $500,000 Commemorative Grant from The Ian Potter Foundation puts social enterprise STREAT firmly on the path to its ‘Holy Grail’ – of achieving both full financial self-sufficiency and its decade goal of helping 1,095 young homeless people each year. That’s one young person’s life transformed each meal, each day.
Every night in Australia 105,000 people are left without a home – 44,000 are young people under 25. Most of us are much more fortunate and enjoy a home and family and the prospect of living for 82 years, but the life expectancy for a homeless person in Australia is a shockingly low 45 years.
STREAT is changing this, by providing homeless and at-risk youth aged 16-25 with a supported pathway to employment and independent living, through a life-skills and hospitality training program in its four cafés, coffee roasting and catering business. STREAT started with two small food carts in Federation Square in 2010 and has now helped over 180 young people break the cycle of homelessness.
This Commemorative Grant will enable STREAT to make another quantum leap – and help over 250 people each year. The funding will be used to help build a new youth training academy at ‘Cromwell Manor’, an historic Collingwood property. STREAT has been gifted the use and development rights of this $2.5 million site for 50 years at peppercorn rent by businessman and philanthropist Geoff Harris. The development, costing around $3.5 million, allows STREAT to more than double its income and will include a large café, artisan bakery, coffee roastery, catering kitchen, special event spaces, training rooms and offices.
STREAT’s co-founder and CEO Rebecca Scott says, “A social enterprise has a business brain and a social heart. This grant taps into both of these – it allows us to further grow our business operations to complete self-sufficiency, whilst expanding the number of young people we can help each year. It’s our belief that all of Melbourne’s young people deserve to reach their potential, and this grant helps us give a bunch of our most disadvantaged young people the vital support they need to start their working life.”
BioPak proudly supports the work of STREAT and will contribute the profit from each box of STREAT coffee cups sold directly back to help fund STREAT’s Youth Programs.