In Good hands: how one man made a feel-good charity with flavour
A weekly block barbie started on the streets of Kings Cross is now one of Australia’s most original - and delicious - charities, writes Fiona Gillies
It all happened by accident, really.
About 15 years ago, young naval officer Rob Caslick and a couple of navy mates began wheeling their barbecue from Paddington up the Cross one night a week, to share food with people living on the streets.
“It was also a good way for three young blokes to catch up,” recalls Rob. “We’d get together, do something good, then go for a beer afterwards. It was always a lot of fun.”
It might have been a lot of fun, but the humble weekly barbie was the start of something bigger - much bigger. Rapidly turning into an organic soup kitchen, the activity was to evolve into Two Good Co, one of Australia’s most innovative charities.
Two Good's premise is to sell high-end soups and salads to businesses around Sydney. For each meal sold, an exact replica goes - free - to a woman in a shelter. The soups and salads are cooked to recipes provided by some of Sydney’s top chefs and made in a kitchen by a team of professionals supplemented by women from the shelters where the food is gratefully received. It’s a scheme that is at once original, and delicious.
Rob says his passion for helping the disadvantaged arose after his grandmother took him as a teenager to a soup kitchen. But it wasn’t until he started the barbecue that he began to understand the problems facing the homeless. Each Wednesday evening, as the queues began to form for his barbecues, he noticed that many diners were on heavy recreational or medicinal drugs, and in poor health.
“I thought, ‘Surely we can do better than a rissole on a bit of bread with onion,’” he says. “So we made a commitment to do an organic soup kitchen.”
St Canice’s church in Elizabeth Bay already ran a lunchtime soup kitchen. With donated organic meat and veggies, Rob and friends added a weekly sit-down dinner, reminiscent of the family meals he had enjoyed growing up in a central Queensland mining town.
“The table was such a big presence in my family,” he says. “Coming together around the table as a family really had an impact on me and put those values into me around the importance of sharing a meal and also sharing each other’s time.”
Although the initial aim of the soup kitchen was simply to provide clean, healthy food for people on the streets, Rob soon saw it offered something more.
“We realised that once you provide really good food, you do more than provide food itself. You provide dignity and respect and self-worth,” he says. “I always remember this one guy I was having dinner with and he said, ‘Rob, for one hour each week, I don’t feel homeless.’ And for me that was the essence of what we are trying to do.”
By this stage, Rob had left the navy and was working full-time as an engineer with a building services firm, where he met fellow engineer Cathal Flaherty. When Rob wanted to scale up the organic soup kitchen three years ago with an idea to sell meals in order to be able to give other meals away, Cathal was on board. The first week, they sold six meals and gave six identical meals to a local women’s shelter. The next week, it was eight, then 10. Two Good was on its way.
Not long after this, Rob won the Food For Good prize at the 2015 Good Food Guide awards. In a delightful bit of good fortune, a congratulatory email sent to the winners – including all the hatted chefs – was accidentally sent “CC” instead of “BCC”.
“All of a sudden I had the email addresses for all of the top chefs in Sydney,” Rob grins. He cheekily wrote to Neil Perry, Peter Gilmore, Matt Moran and others, asking them to donate a recipe for his Two Good Venture. They all did and the meals, in cool glass jars, are branded with each chef’s name – Kylie Kwong’s Chicken Noodle Soup, for example.
“How could you say no to Rob?” Kylie, who runs Billy Kwong restaurant in Potts Point, asked rhetorically in a recent interview. “How could you say no to these women who are in need?”
The business recipe is simple. Lunch customers order $14 soups or salads designed by a big-name chef. There’s a minimum of 10 per order, so corporate or group purchases are the way to go. The meals are picked up by Two Good partner Deliveroo, who drop them direct to city offices. The same lunch is delivered to a women’s refuge.
Two Good currently sells 500 soups or salads a week and gives away 500. The meals are created in a kitchen in Eveleigh, where Two Good employs a professional head chef and sous chef, along with five women from domestic violence shelters in a program called Work Work. “They work with us for three months and we work with them on finding a job in hospitality after those three months,” says Rob.
The first intake of women has already moved into permanent employment with Harris Farm, Compass Group and Hammond Care, where they are supported for nine months as they settle in.
“It’s really an opportunity to use Two Good as a stepping stone and not a final place of employment, and allows us to employ more women over a longer period of time.
Our goal is six every three months, so there’s 24 over a year.”
As for meals, Two Good’s long-term goal is to reach every women’s shelter in the country, which is estimated to be 10,000 meals a week. While that’s a long way from where they are now, the business is gaining steady corporate backing and, says Rob, “there’s no reason we can’t get to 5000 meals a week in two years.”
Two Good has partnered with property group Charter Hall to deliver 20,000 meals to regional Australia and a volunteer group of National Australia Bank executives recently spent two weeks looking at ways to maximise the impact of that 20,000-meal partnership. NAB has also provided money for a new website.
Rob now runs Two Good without co-founder Cathal, who returned to engineering, and a steady income, several months ago.
As for his two navy mates who started the barbecue venture with Rob all those years ago? One is now an orthopaedic surgeon at Royal North Shore Hospital; the other is an orthodontist.
“Yeah, and I’m still in the charity sector, eating baked beans on toast,” Rob grins.
“I’ll never make a million dollars, but when I read the emails I get, thanking me for what we’re doing, that’s my million dollars.”
Two Good has added a clothing line to its repertoire. Buy a Jac + Jack outfit and the same outfit will be donated to a woman in a domestic shelter.