Social Well-being Finalist - Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Member Recipes Project - 2026 Tidy Towns Awards
For people seeking asylum, day-to-day life often means being on the receiving end of services, food parcels, housing support, casework. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre's Member Recipes Project deliberately flips that arrangement, at least for an afternoon.
Members are invited to teach, not just attend. Each quarter, a handful of ASRC members share two or three recipes from home, demonstrate how to cook them, and run a workshop for Community Kitchen volunteers, most recently showcasing Egyptian and Pakistani dishes. Every participant receives two gift vouchers, one for developing the recipe and demonstrating it, another for running the volunteer workshop, formal recognition that their time and knowledge has real value.
Recipes are deliberately built around ingredients already available through the ASRC Foodbank, so members can recreate the same healthy, culturally meaningful meals at home with what they can actually access, not an aspirational shopping list.
What ASRC staff have found is that these sessions do something a formal briefing never could: volunteers walk away with a genuinely deeper understanding of the lives and cultures of the people they're supporting, built through an afternoon of cooking together rather than a training slide deck.
The X-factor is the shift in who's the expert in the room. For a few hours each quarter, ASRC members aren't receiving a service. They're the ones everybody else came to learn from.
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