A grant worth more than $10,000 was awarded to the Nowra East Kitchen Garden project at the Sydney Royal Easter Show on Monday, April 22.
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The grant is courtesy of the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW Foundation (RASF).
The Community Kitchen Grant provides kitchen cabinetry and benchtops, along with at least $10,000 worth of kitchen appliances, every year to towns in NSW that successfully demonstrate the benefits a kitchen upgrade would have on the local community.
This year the kitchen and appliances have been generously donated by IKEA.
RAS Foundation Executive Officer, Cecilia Logan, said the calibre of entries was high, with more than 60 applications from across NSW.
"It was tremendously difficult to choose a winner as there are just so many worthy communities," Ms Logan said.
"The winning applications demonstrated active, close knit communities able to achieve great things with a fabulous new kitchen.
"A key factor was that the kitchen will receive broad use by different community groups and can attract new groups or events, resulting in additional revenue streams for local organisations."
Alex McNeilly, Project Manager from the Nowra East Community Garden Kitchen Project Team, Nowra East Public School and Nowra East Community Pride Group said the grant would transform the Nowra East community.
"This will enable (us) to complete the internal build of our Nowra East community kitchen, it will facilitate lots of new programs including community cooking programs, Aboriginal traditional and modern cook-ups, seniors cooking programs, multicultural cooking, garden to plate cooking and neighbourhood cooking sessions," said Mr McNeilly.
"Making this available to all of the community supports social cohesion, inclusion, health, and creates a strong resilient neighbourhood kitchen community.
"We can now press forward and get our kitchen construction started, knowing we have ... everything we needed to finish our community kitchen.
"We hoped to have the new community kitchen completed and operational in July this year so that everyone in the Nowra East community can enjoy it."
