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Turning the tables: The abuse survivor who supplies 128,000 meals a year

Megan Johnston
Megan Johnston

Turning the tables: Paula Zrilic has set up her own food bank.
Turning the tables: Paula Zrilic has set up her own food bank.Edwina Pickles

As a community worker who helps feed disadvantaged families, Paula Zrilic doesn't seem like she might have gone hungry not long ago herself.

But just over two years ago, the mother-of-three from the south-western outskirts of Sydney found herself somewhere she never thought she'd be: a single mother struggling to support her children.

After escaping an abusive long-term relationship, and with three school-aged daughters to look after, she turned to the only place she knew for help – food relief charity Foodbank NSW & ACT.

That first $20 box of provisions came as a relief – the food was just enough to feed her family and make some treats for her youngest daughter's birthday – but as a vegetarian with another child with coeliac disease, Zrilic realised she no longer had the luxury of choosing the types of food she and her children wanted or needed.

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"The worst thing is when you're needing help and you've got something you can't even use but you've got to be grateful for," Zrilic says. "It's really not a good place to be."

The turning point

'Within a week or day people's circumstances can change and you can go from being very comfortable to a situation where you have no food.'

The experience drove Zrilic into action. Within weeks she had set up her own food delivery hub at the youth centre where she worked, supplying affordable groceries to local families in crisis as well as the "working poor" such as herself.

A second food bank soon followed, this time at a centre closer to home. Demand surged – to about 128,000 meals over the next 12 months – so Zrilic set to work on an even bigger food bank down the road, this one under her own charity.

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This project – called Our Community Pantry – opened this month in Tahmoor. Run mostly by volunteers, the food bank offers discounted groceries every Tuesday. For $25 to $30 members (pensioners, jobseekers and others in financial need) can pick up a week's worth of groceries supplied by Foodbank and local farmers. Within its first week of operation, it supplied literally a tonne of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Crucially, people can pick and choose what they want to buy.

"It's not about cheap food, it's not about the hand-out," Zrilic says. "That allows people to get stuck in a system. We need to empower people to grow ... it's about educating people about food."

Building confidence in the kitchen

Coming from a European family with a strong tradition of cooking, part of Zrilic's mission is to give people more confidence in the kitchen. One of the challenges of food insecurity and scarcity, she says, is it often leads people to reach for cheap processed foods. That's why her pantry provides $10 recipe packs for nutritious family meals such as goulash, butter chicken or sweet potato bake. Members try a sample in store, then buy the ingredients to cook at home.

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"We're actually seeing families who were not cooking, they were just surviving on bits, now actually cooking meals and then even coming back and offering recipes for future meals," she says.

Practical support for a new life

Zrilic's personal experience guides much of this philosophy. Even as a community worker aware of the insidious nature of domestic violence, it wasn't easy for her to see a way out of her own situation.

But after a series of escalating incidents, including one where she found herself locked outside her family's semi-rural property on a cold winter's night without her keys and mobile phone, she finally decided to seek help, and start looking for a new place to live. Eventually Zrilic and her daughters set up a new home with a fridge, washing machine and little else.

"We had what was perceived as what most people would want. Married with three kids," she says.

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"What I want my story to [convey] is within a week or day people's circumstances can change and you can go from being very comfortable to a situation where you have no food."

Looking back, Zrilic credits the first food bank she visited with helping her break free of her relationship and providing the practical support she needed to establish a new life.

"A box of food was a turning point for me. I can just imagine what that box of food is doing for [others] as well," she says.

"If [our] pantry can help people not just move out of a dangerous situation, but actually keep them out ... then I know my story was not in vain."

Photo: Good Food

Click here to watch Zrilic's full story on the ABC's 7.30 Report.

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Megan JohnstonMegan Johnston is a producer and writer for Good Food.

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