Salvos Lighthouse Café in Footscray outgrows its home
The Salvation Army’s Lighthouse Cafe in Footscray, Melbourne, has temporarily closed to find a larger venue to meet demand, according to Melbourne Salvos Project 614 leader Major Brendan Nottle.
“We’ve been overwhelmed by the need,” Brendan said during an interview on 774 ABC Melbourne Breakfast this week.
“We’re relocating to another site that will be more suitable to the work we want to do, not just in terms of being able to accommodate more people in the cafe but also having additional spaces where we can co-locate with other services.”
A sign in the window of the cafe states that, “The Lighthouse Cafe will be permanently closing at this site on Friday 23rd October 2026. The Lighthouse Cafe has outgrown this space and will be relocating to a larger premises. More information to come – stay tuned. #ExcitingTimesAhead.”
The social service cafe, a partnership with the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation, opened in May.
It was opened to provide vulnerable Footscray community members with free meals and connections to homelessness, mental health, and drug and alcohol support.
“We were seeing 170 people on average a day come through that cafe, and initially we were expecting 50 to 60,” Brendan said on the radio program.
“Even in the first couple of weeks we were thinking, ‘We’ve got a problem here’, because it’s one single room and it wasn’t big enough to accommodate the number of people coming through.”
Brendan said that although a new location had not yet been found, The Salvation Army was committed to keeping the service in Footscray.
Some information courtesy of ABC News. Link to their ful story here.
