Here at Cater Care, we’re proud to provide exceptional quality aged care catering, remote catering, education catering, and facilities management services to clients across the country. Our core values of Care, Pride, and Community dedicate us to supporting the communities we live and work in, and our Caring in the Community corporate social responsibility (CSR) program and its campaigns are at the forefront of our efforts to live out those values.
May saw the team wrap up 2024’s Walk the Talk by Cater Care campaign which successfully raised more than $17,000 from all areas of the business. These funds have been donated directly to Lifeline, where the proceeds of the team’s hard work will help train Crisis Supporters to save lives in our community.
Although we’re deeply proud of this achievement, May’s campaign was simply the latest in a string of efforts to support both of our major charity partners in their life-saving work that extends back to Caring in the Community’s 2020 launch.
Walking the Talk with Lifeline
Lifeline was founded in 1963 with a simple mission: ensure nobody had to face their darkest moments alone. They’ve spent the last sixty-one years saving lives with extensive suicide prevention services, but their non-profit status means they’re ultimate reliant on charitable donations to keep the lights on.
Since 2020, we’ve been supporting Lifeline through our annual Walk the Talk CSR campaign. Walk the Talk lays down the gauntlet by challenging the Cater Care team to each walk 65 kilometres throughout May – one kilometre for each thousand Australians who attempt suicide each year – while raising mental health awareness and funding for Lifeline.
Every dollar raised by these campaigns goes towards recruiting, training, and retaining Crisis Supporters who answer calls, texts, and online messages to make sure nobody has to be alone. Our most recent Walk the Talk campaign saw the team walk 6,639 kilometres to raise slightly over $17,000 – all of which will go straight to saving lives.
Showing our Christmas Pride with Foodbank
Food insecurity is a silent crisis in Australia. In 2023, approximately 36% of Australian households – some 3,7000,000 of them – experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. Since 1992, Foodbank has provided freely accessible pantries of essential goods to struggling community members, and they’ve been playing catch-up with rising demand ever since.
Although they accept donations year-round, our show of force for Foodbank comes from our annual Christmas Pride campaign. Christmas Pride pits Cater Care’s site teams against one another in a series of internal competitions that challenge us to give our best in serving up quality food, delighting our residents, and keeping Foodbank’s pantries well-stocked.
Thanks to Foodbank’s powerful logistics network, every dollar donated can help them provide two meals for those in need. Beyond just monetary donations, Foodbank also gratefully accepts shelf-stable and in-date produce – something Cater Care is able to provide in abundance. Last Christmas saw the team provide the funding for more than 5,000 meals to help keep food on the tables of families everywhere during one of the most expensive times of year.
Our impact so far
In the four years since the launch of the Caring in the Community CSR program, a number of strides have been made within the community support space – not least of which is the more than $100,000 the Cater Care team has raised for our two partners.
Since 2020, we’ve helped raise just over $12,000 for Foodbank, which equates to roughly 24,000 meals funded – enough to keep more than two hundred people fed for a month straight. In addition to the funds raised, every year we donate a significant amount of food and produce that goes directly to their pantries.
Our fundraising work with Life has raised just above $60,000 over the last four years. Lifeline estimates that just over $7,000 is required to recruit and retain a Crisis Supporter for one calendar year – meaning that we’ve helped approximately eight Crisis Supporters take the hot seat and answer roughly 1,500 calls from those in distress.
Lending a helping hand
We’re incredibly proud of the positive outcomes our Caring in the Community program has delivered so far, but that doesn’t mean we plan to rest on our laurels. After all, achieving such significant figures in our recent campaigns simply means we’ll have a bigger goal to topple next time.
While we run each major campaign annually, our dedicated partner donation portals are available year-round. If you’re willing and able, you could help a family put food on the table by pitching in for Foodbank HERE, or you could help raise funds for a life-saving conversation by supporting our friends at Lifeline HERE.
