Foodbank WA regularly helping more than 1000 families a day amid ‘entrenched’ cost of living crisis

Foodbank WA is regularly helping more than 1000 families per day, with recent interest rate relief failing to ease the unprecedented demand.

The food relief charity is supporting a growing number of employed people living in their cars, according to chief executive Kate O’Hara, who also told of children not attending school because their parents were unable to fill their lunchboxes.

So far this year, the daily tally of households supported by Foodbank WA’s six branches and more than 70 mobile sites has exceeded 1000 on 19 occasions.

This compares to 18 occasions for all of 2024 and just three in 2023, when Foodbank WA reached the 1000-a-day milestone for the first time.

“What we’re seeing more and more is people who have some income flowing into the household, coming to us when they never thought they would,” Ms O’Hara said.

“As recently as this morning, someone’s come in because there’s literally no food left, and they’ve only just been able to pay the mortgage.

“If they weren’t here today, they would have probably not been able to make next month’s mortgage. So it’s a real stress on households.”

The charity has seen a 15 per cent increase in the number of households it is supporting compared to this time last year, with financial stress particularly evident in the charity’s regional centres.

“What we are seeing very strongly in the branches is more and more people have a job, but are living in their car,” Ms O’Hara said.

“Albany is very, very hard to get housing, through to Bunbury, all of the branches are seeing this.”

At the end of 2024 Foodbank WA started supplying fruit and vegetables for free to encourage more nutritional consumption.

State Government funding allowed Foodbank WA to purchase meat at a discounted rate from WA suppliers. She said support from producers and retailers had been essential.

Ms O’Hara said some parents made the decision not to send their children to school when they were unable to fill their child’s lunchbox.

“It’s really important these programs continue, some schools are saying they used to see some students come, now they are seeing nearly every family in the school come,” she said.

Ms O’Hara said the three interest rate cuts this year had not lessened the demand, because the need in the community “was so long-standing that it’s entrenched.”

“People are making significant changes to balance the budget. If you lose your home, you’ve got nowhere to go, the spiral gets significantly faster and then you see the sort of trauma that rolls into every other service provider and emergency departments in hospitals,” she said.

“We have to be better at prevention. The State of WA has more food than we need, we just have to move it smarter.”

Foodbank WA is seeking to move its Bunbury headquarters to a new purpose-built hub at Dalyellup Beach Estate, alongside Youth Focus and the Financial Wellbeing Collective.

“We’re trying to innovate, we’re trying to make it so more people will come forward, and less people are in hardship,” Ms O’Hara said.