Matt's Place

Apologies to our Year 11 VCAL students for the delay in publishing this article but we felt it was important that everyone who donated food would be pleased to see what happened with the donations.

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On December the 5th 2018 our day started walking into school as Year 11 VCAL students and leaving as elves, reindeer and even Santa. Just before 9.00am we loaded up the car with all the food donations we had been raising/collecting from our school community for the past month before we went to Matt’s Place.

Matt’s Place is a community (home cooked meal) lunch held each Thursday for our homeless community at Matthew’s Anglican Church in Cheltenham. As well as putting a lunch on for the residents Matt's place also distriute non-perishable food.  After packing Mrs Anderson’s car we set off and started our journey to Matt’s Place with the challenge of getting there before 10:30am! Once we arrived we unpacked Mrs Anderson’s car and  greeted the volunteers and started to set-up all the food items we had collected. After we had set up we said a prayer with the volunteers and were instructed on our tasks and expectations whilst we were there. Some of the tasks we helped with were, making tea/coffee, helped carry/pack food items to take, helped clean the tables  and nail painting.  

After the residents had finished their meals and had left, we were all offered a meal as a thank you. We all helped pack up and put away the tables when we had finished and even some of the boys got their nails painted. Once we finished we were with the task of finding our back to school. All the residents and volunteers were so grateful and ecstatic to see us.

I’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who donated to our food drive for us to take to the residents, Mrs Anderson for helping us put this project together and Christmas costumes and to Matt’s place for having us and giving us the opportunity to give back to our community.

Mrs Anderson & the VCAL students