When Orange Uniting Church first started its weekly hot meal program, volunteer Bev Rankin thought they would be serving up around 50 feeds a night to those doing it tough in the community during the colder months.
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Nine months on, the need for the service in town is showing no signs of decreasing, with around 130 people showing up at the church most Saturday nights for dinner.
Late last month church volunteers served up 191 meals - their most dinners in a single night.
It's a number which Mrs Rankin and her team "never envisioned" when they started the program back in May 2020.
"We didn't anticipate having to do 100 meals. We were thinking maybe 50," she said.
"Once it got over a 100, then we thought, 'wow, there's a bigger level of need in the community than what we were aware of."
Numbers do fluctuate sometimes, she added, but attendees are predominantly elderly and on pensions.
"It's a real mixture [of people]," she added. "A lot of them [are] are living on their own. A lot are single people who are older. There's a range of genders and ages [though]. But basically it's people who are just finding it hard to make ends meet," she said, adding most were not homeless.
Some of those who sought help were even employed but did not earn enough to afford groceries due to being part-time or casual workers.
With no end to the crisis in sight, the Uniting Church applied for a $2,000 with Orange City Council and were delighted to instead receive $10,000 just before Christmas.
In addition to going towards food, the grant would also pay for commercial-scale equipment to prepare the many meals required.
"[It'll] make life a lot easier because when you're grating carrots for 100 meals - that's a lot of chopping or grating or slicing [every week]," Mrs Rankin said.
"It eases the pressure on us," she said of the grant. "The fact we know we now have that budget we can breathe a lot more easily.
"We can be a lot more generous. We can provide better meals."
Being on the front-line of such a vital service over the past nine months has been incredibly sobering for Mrs Rankin and her team of volunteers.
One person the Uniting Church had been providing assistance to told volunteers that if it wasn't for the meal service she wouldn't be able to eat on weekends.
Mrs Rankin was unsure if things were getting worse in the community, but there had certainly been a "steady increase".
"That would indicate that things aren't getting any easier," she said.
"We know that JobSeeker is being scaled back so that's going to put pressure on people's budgets. We also know that rent in Orange has gone up and finding affordable accommodation is a big issue for people... and the price of food is going up."
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