Onkaparinga is the largest metropolitan council in South Australia stretching across 51 suburbs, of which a third of the population is experiencing socio-economic disadvantage, receiving welfare including unemployment benefits, disability pensions and rent assistance. If successful, Colonnades Shopping Centre will not only donate a shop front and but will financially assist in constructing a purpose built kitchen.

Thanks again to all our supporters, over 1000 people in Killarney, Stanthorpe, Warwick (of course!) and even as far away as South Africa and England!! Totally amazing!!!

Hopefully we’ll be starting up our own cooking lessons soon. Here are just some of the ideas so far:

* Jamie Oliver Recipes
* Cooking for Kids
* Cooking for Teens
* Multicultural Cooking
* Cooking on a Budget
* Cooking with Seasonal Produce
* Guest Chefs

Spunky Jamie would have been nice, but there’s absolutely nothing stopping us from doing our own classes, which is exactly what we will do!

The good news though is the Southern Downs is much healthier than their coastal cousins! Apparently their region’s adult obesity rates are 26% higher than the overall Queensland rate. Ours is pretty much floating around the state and national average, so that’s good news.

A BIG, ENORMOUS thank you to everyone who signed the petitions, plus the businesses and WSHS who went out of their way to get even *more* signatures and thank you to the medical professionals, businesses and charities who sent in letters of support.

I’m not too disappinted we didn’t win. Warwick Collective already had goals to promote healthy eating through cooking lessons, our community garden and gardening classes.  So full steam ahead!!!

The application needs to demonstrate:

• why our community needs and would benefit from a Pop-Up Kitchen being located in it;
• that our community has a sincere interest in becoming a host location for a Pop-Up Kitchen.

The areas we need to cover include community characteristics and need, site availability, complementary programs and evidence of community support.

So, we’ve written a list of local organisations (as requested in the application food and non-food related) who we can approach for letters of support. We’ll contact all those on Monday, during business hours.

But there’s no reason to wait  for business hours to start getting expressions of support from the community!

We decided to start a Facebook page – facebook.com/choosewarwickjamieoliver – where we can have people post why they want Jamie’s Pop-Up kitchen in Warwick. We can use these in the application under the “testimonials” section. And just getting lots of likes will look good!

Jamie’s Ministry of Food Pop-Up Change.org Petition

Importantly we also need a petition that will demonstrate community support – http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/jamie-oliver-and-the-ministry-of-food-choose-warwick-for-jamie-s-ministry-of-food-pop-up-kitchen. I’m hoping for 3000 signatures, which is ambitious, but that’s the only way we can win! (The Dandenong Ranges already have 536 signatures so we have some catching up to do!)

We’ll also ask Jonno to print out a heap of paper-based petitions and take them around town to get even more signatures. We’d love for some help though, so just download the Jamie Oliver Petition here and contact us when you want it collected. Remember that we’ll need it by the 4th March at the absolute latest to include it in the application.

Even though we’ll be competing against 100’s of other Australian communities, I think we have a good chance!!