COMMUNITY FOODIES

Ms THOMPSON (Reynell) (15:51): It gives me great pleasure today to speak about an event I attended last Friday, and that is the 2011 Community Foodies Recognition and 10^th anniversary celebration. It was held at the Warriparinga-Living Kaurna Cultural Centre and involved people from many different backgrounds coming together to celebrate the achievements of the Community Foodies and the knowledge they have gained about healthy eating, growing food and ensuring that our eating contributes to our health.

Community Foodies is an important peer training initiative that was initiated by Southern Community Health many years ago. It got off to a rocky start. It was not well understood as a health promotion mechanism, but now I am pleased to say that it is a statewide program, managed out of Southern Primary Health under the current leadership of Kim Voss, who is the current manager of the program. There were about 80 foodies present at the celebration and 35 of their program workers. Overall there are 263 active foodies across 21 foodie sites around South Australia.

The foodies were told on the day about how they are doing more than having fun and providing valuable information and, in many cases, as was shown from the evaluation programs, developing self-confidence and self-esteem. Kim pointed out to them as part of her speech that they are contributing to the State's Strategic Plan. They are doing that by supporting objective 2, which is about wellbeing and includes targets such as healthy weight and prevention around chronic disease; objective 5, building communities, a target to contribute to a high level of volunteering in South Australia; and target 5.7 about Aboriginal leadership, which aims to increase the number of Aboriginal South Australians participating in community leadership and in community leadership development programs.

The extension of this initiative to Port Augusta has been very important in enabling a number of Aboriginal people to participate in the training and the subsequent peer education. There are now Aboriginal educators in Port Augusta, around Port Pirie and in the Southern Fleurieu taking a leadership role in the community—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—showing people how easy healthy eating and food preparation can be.

There are four basic messages that Community Foodies promote: eat breakfast every day; drink more water; eat more fruit and vegetables; and eat more wholefoods. They have been highly commended initiatives by the minister for trade and development. The Community Foodies in some ways, because of the nature of the program not being well understood, have had the benefit of being carefully evaluated over the years. Foodies go through a 24-hour training course and they fill out a questionnaire before and after they have finished the training.

Through this evaluation it has been established that there has been a large increase in confidence in foodies' teaching skills and nutrition knowledge and their ability to run programs. Their confidence in planning and cooking skills, skills to work with other organisations and nutrition knowledge to prepare healthy meals for themselves and their families increased by a large amount; the number of serves of vegetables eaten each day increased by a moderate amount; and their confidence in their cooking skills to prepare healthy meals for themselves and their family increased by a small amount.

Foodies have a passion for the growing, cooking and eating of healthy food, and they have a commitment to making a difference in the places they live. They make a difference to the health and wellbeing of their local communities. This ability to influence and make a difference happens more because they live and work in their own communities.