Sustainable Table is an environmental not-for-profit working to heal Australia’s food system from the inside out. As an agile team of practitioners, researchers and thought leaders, we connect regenerative projects with those who wish to fund them, seeding and scaling food system transformation right across the country. Way back in 2009, before ‘zero waste’ was a hashtag and ‘ethical eating’ had entered the household vernacular, we founded Sustainable Table. As an environmental not-for-profit, our aspiration was to help people make the connection between the food on their plates and the state of our planet. We rolled out campaigns like Give A Fork, resources like the Good Milk Directory and Ethical Shopping Pyramid, community events like the Mt Martha Farmers’ Market, and even an award-winning cookbook; all intended to engage, educate and entertain eaters… while casually changing the world.
In 2020, our world sent a pretty clear message: Hey! Lift your game! I’m struggling over here! With a backdrop of catastrophic bushfires, climate change predictions and a global pandemic, the positive changes we’d been chipping away at for the last 12 years took on a whole new sense of urgency.
Our community grants program (then known as Ripe For Change) was going from strength to strength in Victoria, offering support and funding for grassroots initiatives like veggie box programs, First Nations cook ups, training for young farmers, community market gardens, seed banks, and farms transitioning from conventional to regenerative agriculture. Though seemingly “small”, these projects represented something important: an alternative to the industrialised paradigm so implicated in our intersecting national and global crises. The seeds of a regenerative food system. And we decided to water them. To keep things simple, we renamed Ripe For Change to The Sustainable Table Fund and stepped into a redefined role as a connector between important work that needs to take place, and those who wish to invest in it. When we launched the Fund to the philanthropic community in April this year, we successfully raised over 1.4 million dollars (and counting!) to fund our core delivery team and local food initiatives that are, step-by-step, day-by-day, plate-by-plate, taking us all in the right direction. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, framework, principles and impacts skip on over to our Fund page. Or send us an email to start the conversation.
Wondering what happened to ‘the old Sustainable Table’? Fear not! You can access 12 years’ worth of ethical eating resources and guides, here. Our focus has now shifted towards transforming Australia’s food system from the inside out, supporting and funding projects that regenerate soil, waterways, reefs, forests, communities, knowledge, and wellbeing right across the country. You can learn more about Sustainable Table’s transition here..