Living is giving

18 Jul 2016

Ronni Khan’s vision for OzHarvest is to rescue excess food from commercial outlets and deliver it direct to hungry people.

Remember being told to ‘eat up, because there are people starving around the world’? It’s a universal homily, explains Ronni Khan, CEO of food rescue organisation OzHarvest. It doesn’t matter if she’s talking with people from India, Africa, Asia, Europe or the US – everybody has heard it – so she shouldn’t have to teach anybody that food waste is a commodity we should be using better.

And yet, just over 10 years ago, Ronni and a team of pro-bono lawyers had to lobby state governments to change some rules so that surplus food could be donated to charitable causes without fear of liability. NSW agreed in 2005 and ACT, SA and Qld soon followed.

Now OzHarvest’s yellow vans collect excess food from more than 2000 businesses in cities all over Australia and redistribute meals to more than 800 charities.

“I didn’t start OzHarvest (in November 2004) because I was a bored, rich housewife,” says Ronni. “I started it because I wanted to take advantage of the opportunities I’ve been given to give back to other people. I wanted to know my purpose and I wanted to come full circle to the values I grew up with – that living is giving.”

Every person is equal Born in South Africa to white Jewish parents during apartheid, Ronni understood early that the resources of the earth aren’t shared fairly.

Her family members were horrified observers of apartheid more than activists, though Ronni and her sister were taught that one way they could change society was to treat every person as equal. “The equality of human beings is an important value in Judaism,” she notes. “So when I became deeply involved in the Jewish youth movement, it was all about equality and socialism. Then I was given a scholarship to go to university in Israel, and for Jews after the Second World War, living in Israel was a very important part of fulfilling that cultural piece.”

After receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and English, Ronni searched for a practical vocation and started a teaching course. She felt it wasn’t quite her life’s purpose, but it was a start when she and her university friends joined a kibbutz to experience socialism in action.

“I would have rather worked in the field, but I was needed as a teacher,” Ronni admits, adding that after she married and had children, teaching seemed a straightforward path for a while at least.

“When you live on a kibbutz in a socialist lifestyle, you don’t earn money: you give according to your ability and you get what you need.”

In 1976, Ronni, her husband and their first son came to Australia to work in a kibbutz in Sydney, and had a second son. Ronni enjoyed some creative work screen-printing fabric and created clothes that were sold in a Paddington boutique. She would love to have stayed, but the kibbutz exchange in Sydney was only for two years and they missed their relatives in Israel.

“And so we returned to Israel for another eight years, where my parents and sister had come to live. I worked in a florist owned by my brother-in-law and found I was good at customer relations, building the business and decorating flowers,” she recalls. “But with compulsory conscription and two sons, [I was burning] to leave. My brother-in-law was killed during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and I did not want my sons to go to the army.”

Land of the fair go? Ronni’s brother-in-law on her husband’s side encouraged the family to immigrate to Australia, and they finally made the move as their eldest son’s 14th birthday approached, knowing that once he reached that age, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave Israel until he’d completed military service. They had very little money, around $10,000, though they had as Ronni states “the advantage of being white”.

“We arrived here with the willingness to work,” she recalls. “But if we’d arrived today, I don’t think a couple with two children and no money would be welcomed with open arms. So now every refugee we’re knocking back is a potential me, a potential Frank Lowy, potential anybody. And for me, that whole notion of opportunity is part of the reason I want to contribute back.”

The same relationship-building and creative skills that helped her succeed in floristry in Israel translated well to event production in Australia. Ronni muses that our country is blessed with an abundance and variety of food, and Australians love putting on a good spread… but how far are we prepared to share it?

“Every one of my events had masses of food and a lot of it was going to waste,” Ronni remembers. “After each event, if I could, I would grab some of that food and drop it off on the way home to the one place that I knew (a refuge). I’d worked hard to build a reputation, I had a roof over my head, food on my table and two healthy children but I was looking for my purpose, why I’d been put on this earth. Then I figured I could amplify the food sharing: collecting leftover food from events and restaurants and giving it to people who really needed it.”

At the turn of the millennium, Ronni’s food-sharing mission took her to New York to meet the people running City Harvest, a non-profit organisation focused on ‘rescuing food for New York’s hungry’. The model appealed to her because it was all about direct action – organising the rescue and sharing of excess food – and offered clear opportunities for businesses to contribute meaningfully.

The first business person she approached was Neil Perry and he ‘got it’ right away: he agreed to share his catering company’s extra food and resources, and helped promote the idea to others in his industry.

“Then I went to my local health food store and said ‘this is what I’m going to do’, and they said ‘awesome, you can start tomorrow’. But we found out we had to get some legislation changed first,” she says.

After intense lobbying in 2005, the Civil Liabilities Amendment Act was revised to allow businesses to hand over leftovers so they could be distributed by charities to the hungry. Food safety is a major priority for OzHarvest, which operates within the food handling guidelines of the Health Departments and in strict compliance with all applicable legislation. With the green light from government, OzHarvest was well-positioned at the front of the new wave for what is now officially known as corporate social responsibility (CSR).

“When we started, I just went to the owner of Goodman, and asked, ‘will you support us?’ and he said ‘yeah’ and came on as our major sponsor. This was before people knew all about CSR (corporate social responsibility). It was just known as ‘giving back to your community’.”

Nourishing more people in need “I became a little bit like the Pied Piper: the people who said, ‘I can’t see how that would work’, I just told them to mind out of my way,” says Ronni with a smile.

“I didn’t know the scale of how useful it would be. I didn’t even connect the environmental side. All I saw and thought of was: there is food and I know there are people in need. And it’s only once I started doing it that I thought, ‘holy moly, where was this food going?’ It was going to landfills.”

Now OzHarvest is on the global stage, participating in a campaign partnered with the United Nations Environment Program called ‘Think. Eat. Save’.

The program delivers several levels of education, from food preparation and cooking scholarships to help vulnerable youth break the poverty cycle, to family-health education about choosing healthy fresh food rather than (often more expensive) processed food and community campaigns about cutting food waste.

“Parents and grandparents can teach young people about sharing more too,” suggests Ronni.

“Learning how to be kind and having gratitude will support them through their lives. Being nice and understanding helps us find purpose.

“I think volunteering is one of the most rewarding activities – not everybody needs to start a charity, and lord knows we’ve probably got way too many! – it’s about supporting causes you believe in

and helping them grow. No money I’ve ever earned feels as good as what I do now. And I’ve had lots of money trickle through my hands over the years.

“So I’ll stay at OzHarvest as long as I’m useful because I want to minimise hunger, minimise food waste, minimise poverty, minimise homelessness. These are all manmade things, and if we’ve made them, we can unmake them.”