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As Louise prepares charity food packs, she admits that for the first time in a while, she looks forward to waking up and coming to work.
Key points:
- Foodbank WA has partnered with a local prison to address the desperate need for volunteers
- The program prepares inmates for a return to society
- With high inflation and interest rate rises, there is record demand for food charity services
You can't tell, but she's a little different to the other volunteers at the Perth Foodbank.
Louise* is a prisoner.
"It's nice to be able to talk to the community and feel like you're a part of it still," she said.
"It just makes me more excited to be released and actually get back out into the community, experience life again and enjoy."
With interest rate rises and inflation biting across the nation, food charities are not expecting their record demand to ease any time soon.
But in Western Australia, an unlikely partnership with prisoners is helping address the desperate need for volunteers, while also preparing the inmates for a return to society.
The partnership ground to a halt when COVID-19 hit, so Foodbank WA CEO Kate O'Hara was more than happy to see the program resume late last year.
"What we never expected was to have the level of demand from households across our branch network that we are facing today," she said.
"In December, we had our busiest day on record of 914 households coming through our service in one day. While two years ago, our normal was some 200.
"Without the support we get from the teams that visit from Boronia each week, we simply would not be able to cope with the volume."
Ready to 'be part of it again'
Several women from the Boronia Pre-Release Centre for Women, a minimum-security prison in Perth, have become regulars at the Foodbank.
The women are in the last two years of their sentence.
Assistant superintendent of offender services, Alanah Parker, said the women attended four days a week and helped with everything from customer service to warehousing.
"Foodbank might not have enough volunteers that day, and having the women out to this Foodbank, you know they feel like they've achieved something," Ms Parker said.
"And they work really hard."
The centre's acting superintendent, Michael Henderson, said projects like this allowed the women to give back to the community and they provided a pathway into the workforce, including qualifications in some cases.
"For a lot of the women that we've had through custody for circumstances that their lives have found them in, they haven't always had the best employment history," he said.
"This is a way of building their self-esteem and self-confidence back up so when we release them from custody, [they're] able to seek a job and hold down that job."
It is a transition that can be confronting for some women.
"This is the first opportunity for a lot of women who've done a little bit of time in custody to see the outside world again … clothes are different, cars are different," he said.
He recalled opening his wallet near a person in custody "and she didn't know we had plastic money now, so the world changes rapidly, and increasingly so".
"So that's equally important as all the other stuff. They start to learn that there is a society out there … and I'm ready to go out and be part of it again."
Another prisoner's face lit up as she told AM about how she prepared food packs for those affected by recent flooding in the state's north.
But when asked how she felt about her release, she paused.
"I'm kind of nervous of going out, I think, to being what it is now," she said.
"I'm really anxious about the cost of living, the cost of food.
"But to have new skills now, I easily should be able to get work and it should be alright."
*Not her real name.