Bec SCOtt’s 2040 Vision

After a little over a decade of being the CEO and Co-Founder of STREAT, we asked Rebecca Scott what her vision for the future of our social enterprise is, and what she hopes for the sector, and the communities we work with. Here’s what she said, or you can watch the video.

“We pushed our first food cart out onto Federation Square in 2010, and at that stage we were expecting to be a whole fleet of street food carts over the years. Those carts were about training and employing young people in hospitality who were affected by homelessness. We’re not a street food cart anymore, we’ve grown up a little bit and it’s nice that we’re a bit more settled in our flagship cafe site and HQ at Cromwell Street in Collingwood. We’ve got beautiful cafes, and we run a whole portfolio of different hospitality and food businesses. So our business model is a little bit different to what we anticipated.

What hasn’t changed right from that first day and those first nine young people who arrived at STREAT is our commitment to young people and giving them a future.

In 2019 STREAT declared a climate emergency, we’d already been working to make sure our organisation and operations were as green as we could make them, but we really wanted to accelerate our work. We wanted to create new training and employment pathways for young people into green jobs not just into hospitality.

One of the things that we were dreaming about was imagine if we could start to be farming as well. Imagine if we could start to build urban farms and be growing our own food as well as cooking and preparing food for people. We started to imagine what it would be like to be training the next generation of young horticulturalists working alongside us.

And just as we were making all of those plans, the pandemic hit. And so rather than just close our doors and all of our kitchens what we did was start to open farm operations with a whole bunch of partner organisations.

So already we have young farmers being trained across a whole bunch of peer social enterprises. And we’re now growing food in Melbourne rather than just preparing food in Melbourne. We’re really proud to be working with a whole host of social enterprises that are running gardens, and kitchens, and waste enterprises and coming together as a bigger collaboration, Moving Feast. We’re really interested in how do we work together to create a fair and regenerative food system for Victoria.

How do we bring together more and more people together in a large food system movement and be the change we want to see?

Not just every single day in the choices we make in our food but all of those meals together and aggregated start to be the bigger change that we need.

We hope you’ll join us.”

– Bec Scott, CEO & Co-founder of STREAT