UOW staff from across the institution have offered time and financial support to collaborate with community organisations and charities to distribute hot meals, frozen meals, groceries, toiletries and sanitary items in “Panty Packs” to student based in both Wollongong and Sydney. To date over 4000 students have received this support, with donations from staff and community in excess of $55,000.

UOW’s partnership with Healthy Cities Illawarra, aims to address the underlying social, economic and environmental causes of health inequity. Healthy Cities Illawarra is a local organisation working to create healthy environments and enable healthy choices for the people of the Illawarra and Shoalhaven. Together, we are committed to taking action to prevent and control diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, asthma, dementia, depression and anxiety.

Hidden Harvest is a volunteer-fuelled, not for profit organisation based in the Illawarra region upskilling communities to tackle food waste and serve up a more sustainable future. Hidden Harvest has partnered with Sofie Kokalevski, the business development lead for the work-integrated learning subject Career-Ready Learning and Practice to provide numerous UOW students with a variety of meaningful internship opportunities. Hidden Harvest was the winner of the ACEN 2020 Local Hero Award. The Local Hero Award is awarded to a partner organisation that is a small-medium enterprise whose engagement with a university in WIL and whose contribution to the WIL experience of students, is above and beyond the expectation of the size of their organisation.

Foodways is a group of UOW researchers investigating what, how, and why we eat. The group strives to understand the intersection of food, environment and society, from local through to global perspectives, through aligning with the UN SDGs to promote inclusion and connection through food. Foodways brings novel and diverse approaches to complex issues around food, including community and key stakeholders’ perspectives to provide a new lens to disrupt and reform current food systems policies and processes. Foodways’ aim is to increase food autonomy, food system sustainability, and overall health and well-being.

UOW is committed to providing a broad range of food options and was named Australia’s most vegan-friendly university in 2017, by the international group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

UOW Pulse is a not-for-profit organisation where revenue generated is re-invested to support campus life and the student experience. This year, UOW Pulse put together free meal packs to provide much-needed food supplies to our student community during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1400 meal packs distributed in April. UOW Pulse also offers free breakfast to students. To date, 3600 pantry packs have been donated by staff to students across Wollongong and Sydney. The total donations amount to approximately $75,000.

Regenerative agriculture is an environmentally sustainable way of farming that takes a holistic approach to land management. It emphasises improving soil quality naturally, increasing biodiversity, and enhancing soil carbon sequestration and soil water retention. This study looks at the social and emotional journey of farmers.

This multi-university project aims to investigate the role of law, policy, and regulation in enabling local governments and communities to contribute to healthy, sustainable, and equitable food systems. Using an interdisciplinary approach, researchers have analysed policies and initiatives developed by local governments and communities in New South Wales and Victoria ​that aim to contribute to a healthy, sustainable and equitable food system. The knowledge created by this project will inform recommendations for policy and legislative reforms that will empower local governments and communities to respond to food system challenges at the local level. This project is based on a food systems approach, which reflects a growing awareness of the interconnections between food production and consumption, environmental sustainability, and health outcomes, and the need for governance approaches that addresses these interactions.


                    

The Sunraysia Burundian Garden arose via a collaboration between UOW researcher Natascha Klocker, University of Melbourne, refugees from Burundi (living in Mildura) and Sunraysia Local Food Future. Many refugees come from agricultural backgrounds, but face obstacles to farming once in Australia. This research shows that many former refugees living in Australia have a desire to access land on which to grow culturally important crops, but can’t afford to do so due to the cost of farmland. Refugees also struggle to access employment and thus experience protracted unemployment. This research partnership aims to determine how we can come together to match ‘landless’ refugee farmers with unused farmland.

This project investigates sustainable community-based management of coastal fisheries with over 100 local communities in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Outreach involves community awareness presentations, facilitation of development of community-based fisheries management plans, and training for community monitors to track catch in select sites with the goal to support adaptive management by communities.


               

UOW is home to the globally recognised Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources & Security (ANCORS), which is dedicated to delivering specialised research, advisory services, education and training in ocean law and policy, maritime security, and marine resources management. ANCORS’ world class multidisciplinary research includes investigating fish in sustainable food systems and fisheries economics management. As fisheries supply over 15 per cent of the animal protein consumed by 4.2 billion people globally and thus are an integral component in reducing hunger and ensuring sustainable fishing practices and capacity building.

This research supports the development of an integrated approach to address under-nutrition in children and over-nutrition (obesity) in adults by positioning food security as the central drive for sustainably managing coastal fisheries in the Pacific islands.