Cooking up community spirit in Perth
- kirranicolle
- Sep 9
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 11
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
With Perth rental property prices soaring and the increased cost of living continuing to impact households, The Salvation Army in Western Australia is equipping those struggling to make ends meet with the knowledge and resources to cook affordable, nutritious food.
Leanne Boot and Kristen Walker are part of the Community Engagement Team at Doorways in Balga and Morley, in the northern suburbs of Perth. As part of the broader Doorways Community Engagement program, they run weekly Cooking on a Budget classes for community members who, due to disability or other life circumstances, find themselves needing a group such as this one.
“The aim is to provide life skills around cooking, but also around affordable, healthy meals,” Leanne said. “It gives people the opportunity to try things they wouldn't necessarily try at home. We’ve tried to incorporate quite a lot of vegetables that we get or that we see coming through Oz Harvest, which obviously brings the cost down a lot. Most of our meals we're trialling don’t have any meat either.
“That’s new this term because [meat] is driving the cost up for families.”
REA Group Market Insights from April showed that Perth is now on par with the second most expensive capital cities to rent in Australia, with a median rental cost of $700 per week. This, REA Group says, marks the worst point in Perth’s history for rental affordability.
According to 2021 Census data, unemployment in Balga was higher than that of the rest of the state and country, sitting at 7.9 per cent compared with 5.1 per cent.
Kristen said her group, at Morley Corps, is a “mixed bag of skills”. She said both she and Leanne, who works from Balga Corps, will enable participants to engage at a level with which they are comfortable.
“We cater to all abilities in our groups, and we’ve made sure we’ve got safety knives, so people who aren’t comfortable or necessarily confident with chopping [feel] perfectly safe to work within their ability and not be at risk of injuring themselves that way,” Kristen said.
“So they're able to try chopping vegetables they may not have tried before or participate in ways that they couldn't without those facilities.”
The pair have collated existing recipes to make up booklets for community members to take home, adding up to 20 cookbooks in total, with two recipes on the menu each week. Each term, a maximum of 12 participants will join at each location.
After cooking, they will all sit down to eat the meal, clean up together, and any leftovers can either be taken home by the group members or passed on to Doorways staff to be offered to those seeking assistance.
For Kristen, her group is quite social, and she said they get along well with one another. Many live with disabilities or on pensions and are looking for ways to reduce food costs.
For Leanne, sadly, many of the community members she works with throughout all aspects of her work are ingrained in generational poverty. She said many had attended the corps since they were children, as their parents and grandparents also sought assistance from The Salvation Army.
“There are some community members who don’t typically eat daily. The cooking class on a Friday for some is the only balanced meal that they will eat all week,” Leanne said.
As a result, Leanne and Kristen sometimes introduce their groups to foods they might never have tried before. The results can be surprising.
“We did a curry last term that was tofu, and when they all arrived, they were all horrified at the idea of making a tofu curry, but everyone sat down to eat it at the end of the day, and they all loved it,” Kristen said. “Several of them then went out and bought tofu and made it again that week.”
But it isn’t just about food. The Cooking on a Budget program offers a chance to meet others, chat and experience the warmth of community. For those in Kristen’s group, the class offers something extra special.
“In the breaks, they’re always quite disappointed it won’t be on next week,” Kristen said. “And they always look forward to coming back again. One of my participants [recently] said coming to the program is one of the highlights of his week, he just loves to come and be part of a program and see other community members, cook some yummy food and eat together.
“It’s a very social environment for people to be involved in as well [who] might otherwise be quite isolated.”
