COVID 19 - We’ve delivered over 65,000 meals to date!
Who are we?
The Serve is a wholly volunteer led organisation that is committed to serving evening meals 365 days a year, sourcing and redistributing food and household resources, to those in the community who are in need, underprivileged, on low income or going through genuine hardship.
We operate in Hamilton City, providing a space where our community can come together in a welcoming environment to share experiences, company, food and love.
With a no judgement policy our doors are always open whether you need a meal tonight, tomorrow night or every night we are here for you. We never run out of food.
If you need a meal, please contact us through our facebook or get in touch
Our Goals
The Serve’s vision is to continue strengthening our community, with an emphasis on unity. We do this by striving to:
01.
Keep Serving to our local community
We continue to provide a nightly meal every day of the year.
With a focus put on operational sustainability we are always working to improve our service.
02.
Develop stakeholder relationships
We work with a number of community organisations and care for linking our people with other core services that fulfill their immediate needs.
03.
Maintain High Health & Safety Standards
We consistently work to ensure our operations, systems, processes and governance is working effectively to provide our essential service.
04.
COntinue Operating with Financial Stability
Our organisation relies upon the goodness of the community to keep its doors open and our team works hard to continuously support the financial needs of our serves.
Ready to help?
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History
With humble beginnings in a car park in 2014, The Serve began as The Hamilton Homeless Trust. Keen to serve love on the community our story began facing an immediate need; feeding the hungry. There are often many people who are quite surprised at just how many people in our community are unable to fulfill such an essential need each day, but where there is a need there must be a place to turn which is where The Hamilton Homeless Trust came to life.
Each day since then, there has been a nightly meal. As the word spread, we saw our community serves grow in size and the needs of our own operations had to adjust. We began moving to permanent premises providing a meal from a central location in Hood Street. Our time in Hood Street was however numbered which left us with fears of becoming homeless ourselves. Thanks to the generosity of some awesome contributors and the hard work of our Trustees we have now landed in Harwood Street, re branding ourselves as The Serve to better tell the story of what we do for our community each night.
As The Serve we have continued to work with hundred of volunteers, running our serves through the support of rostered cooks, coordinators and servers as well as utilising food from our community partners including food rescue services like Kaivolution. The evolution of The Serve has had us grow from just being a meal service, to being a community service enabling us to bring people together over a hot meal.
“Food is everything we are.
It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma.
It's inseparable from those from the get-go.”
Anthony bourdain
