Social Enterprise In Action: STREAT Tackles Homelessness

STREAT is a not-for-profit social enterprise. It provides hospitality training to homeless youth aged between 16 and 24.

What Does STREAT Do?

STREAT serves high quality coffee and street food to foot traffic – from a food cart. Over an intensive six-month period, young participants work two days a week with STREAT mentors behind the coffee machine and in the kitchen.

They also attend a William Angliss Institute hospitality course and undertake social skills training.

Origins In Vietnam

Co-founder and CEO Rebecca Scott began planning the STREAT programme in 2009, while working with a social enterprise youth café in Hanoi. In Melbourne, she started with:

“a very lonely little food cart in Federation Square – it would constantly be pissing with rain (!).”

Today STREAT has a second cart in Melbourne Central, and cafés in the CBD and Flemington.

Canadian Expat/Chef

Rob Auger, who at one stage of his life worked at the Michelin-starred Château Neercanne in the Netherlands, joined STREAT in 2010,

“after falling in love with Melbourne (and one of its inhabitants)”

Customer Response

It seems customers have low expectations of food from a cart but comments are frequently:

“Actually, it’s really good!”

The Outcomes

STREAT isn’t a job placement agency, its a program that helps young graduates move onto real industry jobs’.

STREAT’s existing sites are now financially self-sustainable and taking an average of 60 students a year. Scott and Auger are aiming to train 100 kids a year by 2015. It’s a great cause, so buy the book, raise a cup, and lend your fork in support.

Approximately 70 percent of ex-students are still working in the hospitality industry while others have gone onto university, using hospitality work to fund further study. Rob says:

“For us it’s about providing stability – a proper base work ethic – so these kids can leap off into any career they want.”

Funding The Social Enterprise

STREAT has developed a 160-page cookbook featuring a combination of Auger’s street food recipes – many of which have an Asian bent – along with the signature dishes and personal stories from their fifth class of trainees.

You can buy the book: STREAT Cookbook – $45.00