Meet Bron, our Community Kitchen volunteer.

Every Tuesday morning for the past 18 years, Bron has walked into the ASRC kitchen and started cooking for people seeking asylum. That’s around 900 Tuesdays, 900 lunches. Bron loves cooking and bringing people together with food. “The kitchen is my happy place,” she says. It shows.

Cooking for up to 150 people in two and a half hours, followed by a clean-up, is exhausting work and by the time she gets home, Bron says, she is “cooked”. But she’s clear about why it matters: the food, and the ASRC itself, give people a safe haven for a few hours, a place to catch up with friends, after they have experienced great hardship and continue to face real challenges. 

Every recipe in the ASRC kitchen has come from a person seeking asylum. “It is wonderful that, here at the ASRC, they can enjoy a nutritious lunch cooked according to recipes from their home countries, relax with their friends and give each other valuable support,” Bron says. 

Bron began volunteering in the ASRC kitchen in 2008, driven by frustration and shock at government policy towards people seeking asylum since 2001: offshore detention, temporary protection visas leaving people in limbo for years. A friend who’d been dropping off food donations to the ASRC suggested Bron attend an information night at the old ASRC office in West Melbourne. “Bron, you love cooking, you should join the kitchen!” the friend told her. So she did.

Back then, the kitchen was barely more than a kitchenette and preparing food for many people was difficult, especially with only two or three cooks on hand. But the job got done every day. To those who witnessed it, it was something of a miracle. When the ASRC moved to its current home in Footscray, a large commercial kitchen certainly made things smoother. 

Eighteen years is a long time to give one day a week. Bron explains it simply: “Because I firmly believe that food brings people together. Because I love working with people who have the same goals, and who are giving their time and being supportive of people who are doing it tough. Because I have formed lovely friendships with so many people working in the kitchen over the years, many of them starting at the ASRC after being encouraged by a friend.” The kitchen teams grew organically. She remembers the “Carlton Crew” and the “Williamstown Crew”, all getting on famously.

Bron says that it is a pity that she and her fellow kitchen volunteers are often too busy to properly talk with clients. But a smile across the platters of food goes a long way and everyone at the ASRC appreciates her warm, positive presence every Tuesday. 

Bron spent 31 years with Ansett Airlines before it folded in 2001 – as a flight attendant, then a trainer, then a recruiter – and felt the loss deeply when the airline closed. Bron muses that if not for that fulfilling career, she might have become a teacher. 

From 2013 to 2018, alongside her kitchen shifts, Bron took on extra volunteer work with the ASRC’s school program, visiting schools to talk with students from grade 6 to grade 12 about the experience of people seeking asylum and the impact of government policies. Watching each age group engage in its own way, she says, was genuinely rewarding. 

When she is not at the ASRC, Bron enjoys everything Melbourne offers – theatre, cooking for friends and travel, sometimes with ASRC friends! She also volunteers one day a week at the Melbourne Museum as a school host, welcoming students, teachers and parents.