Thanks Yarra City Arts for financially supporting and helping promote the Alphington Neighbourhood Gallery. Here’s a link to their latest enews post about Gabe Freeman, the artist currently on our fence.

Also … you might like to sign up to receive their news in your inbox … to keep up to date with what’s going on and coming up. Yarra City Arts do a fabulous job supporting a wide variety of artists, arts projects and events, and art spaces across Yarra each year.

We’re creating a set of building blocks for everyone to play with … featuring the houses in our neighbourhood. And we’re hoping you’ll help us out, by picking up a block from our collection bin, drawing your house on it with a black sharpie and returning it to us. Then we’ll add some colour … and a roof.

Look out for our community arts bins out on the corner over the next few days and join in.

With lockdown extended we think a little community arts cheer is in order … so Lee and I have started work on two new community projects to see us all through the next couple of weeks.

Painted timber blocks … step one!

The first is an interactive neighbourhood project that we’ll need some creative help with …instructions and materials should be out the front of ACC over the weekend for you to collect. Look out for our community art bins … and join in!

We’re also planning to do a little ‘marker of the times’ installation onsite. We are certainly living in a unique era … we think it could be cool to acknowledge it. More to come on this soon.

Lovely to pop into work today to see a great big food delivery from Camberwell Rotary.

If you’d like to donate too then you can drop food off anytime to us. If we are open we have a cupboard inside. If we are closed you can drop off in the dark grey roller shed just inside the back gate. If you have any issues just give us a call 📞.

Andy generally takes all the donations over to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre on a Thursday.

Not sure what to donate? Here’s a list …

If you came to our last morning tea Kalimna may have sent you home with a home cooked meal. We’ve been contemplating how we can reinvent community lunch 🥙 in corona times.

We had some potatoes kindly donated by Gordon Jones Potatoes 🥔 that came our way via Miranda at Melbourne Farmers Markets that we used to make potato and leek soup.

We’ve got lots of young families in our playgroups and older people who live alone, or care for others (and all those in between) who appreciate a meal cooked by someone else every now and then.

Following this, last week I had an inspiring conversation with Miranda and a bunch of lovely people from Cultivating Community - in relation to possibilities around ongoing community food provision.

Cultivating Community is an organisation that ‘runs food and gardening programs to lay the foundations for healthy communities’. They support public housing tenants across a number of sites to build and maintain community gardens, they provide education experiences through their school food garden program and run workshops on all sorts of garden related things.

And they are increasingly hanging out in the ‘hood with Carys on site four days a week at Alphington Community Farmgate building up the productivity 🥕🥦🥬🍅 of the gardens down there.

Our meeting was looking at how we can collaborate on a regular basis in our immediate neighbourhood to use and distribute some of the produce grown by them, or sourced by Miranda from the producers at the market.

It is really a privilege to work with such creative, go-getting, caring, community minded people!

I’ll update you on the progress as we develop the plan. Happy times.