The Fitzroy Soup Van has blessed inner Melbourne city life for 40 years. Initially the project of student volunteers who won the support of the St Vincent de Paul Society, it has expanded to five vans with over 600 volunteers on the Fitzroy list.
Every Evening without Fail by Anne Tuohey tells the story of the Soup Van and the changing contexts in which it provides food for hungry people. It also stirs reflection on how recent developments in society and in religious groups with similar forms of outreach have affected the people whom they serve.
The van began as a student initiative. It was basic: the food was predictable and cold, and the van was ramshackle — because the back doors could not be locked the contents were likely to fall on the street. The volunteers were fearless, going into boarding houses, through parks, under bridges and everywhere homeless people were to be found. Health and safety protocols were minimal.
The van was also centred in the Catholic Church. Although its volunteers came from many religions and none, with no questions asked, most of the leading spirits had been students at Catholic schools and often involved in church youth groups. The van itself responded to the decision of the Missionaries of Charity to move their accommodation for homeless men from Fitzroy to semi-rural Greenvale. Young volunteers who had helped out in Fitzroy recognised the effect this would have on homeless people. The van was to address their needs.
It was also natural for the van to find support from the Vinnies, the Catholic organisation most involved with homeless people. Within a short period the Ozanam House Kitchens became available for preparing food. Initially, too, some groups working on the Van would begin the evening with a prayer. The Vinnies ethos inevitably influenced the character of the van, and particularly the conviction that the Vannies' mission was primarily to engage respectfully and warmly with the people whom they served.
Over 40 years the scope, organisation and service offered by the soup van has grown. But it continues to be local: volunteers identify less with the Vinnies than with the van, and less with the van than with their night on it.
The contexts of the van's work have changed greatly. The Catholic Church is now much more thinly spread in the area that the van serves. As in other churches local congregations and their leadership are ageing and diminished; organisations for students and young people, particularly those with an emphasis on social outreach, attract less members. This thinning out also affects the vans. Fewer volunteers are connected to church congregations, and many share the widespread ambivalence about the Catholic Church in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis.
"The history of the soup van is a history of risk taking. So is the Christian tradition at its best."
A positive response to these changes has been the stronger connection of the vans with the broader community. The vans are supported by food businesses, and many corporations also provide volunteers for particular nights.
The vans, like similar ventures of the Baptists and the Salvation Army, have also been affected by the growth in government regulation. Health and safety regulations and those protecting child safety have affected the preparation, transport and serving of food, as well as the opportunity of school students to volunteer. More demands, too, are now made of volunteers: they must have police checks, and incidents need to be monitored and reported.
These changes are worth reflecting on. They have certainly improved the quality of the food provided and diminished the risk of providing poisoned food (although a far greater risk has always surely come from the squalor of the living conditions and obstacles to personal hygiene facing the people who are served). And the risks of exposing young people to dangerous situations have also lessened.
The culture of risk avoidance, with the limitations it places on the participation of young people in adult activities and on preparation of food outside a registered kitchen and transport, however, sits uneasily with the spirit of the soup van. It jars with a venture where highly motivated young people, who had already moved beyond school boundaries when students, ran with an idea, implemented it on the smell of an oily rag, learned from their mistakes and soon found partners in cooperative adults and organisations. The history of the soup van is a history of risk taking.
So is the Christian tradition at its best. It is about laying down one's life for others, going to Jerusalem at the risk of being killed, having higher goals than preserving one's health and life, visiting the infectious sick in lice-ridden hovels, and going out to strangers on the edge of society beyond the safe centre. It is the church of the martyrs. These values are learned in youth, not recklessly, but neither in sanitised nor completely safe environments.
The soup van is in good hands because its people recognise the tension between the need for compliance with security and safety regulations and the call to draw close to people whose lives are lived beyond those boundaries. People attracted to the vans will jump over barriers that stop them walking the extra mile.
The greater risk is to churches of having the energy, idealism and transgressiveness of youth lost to their congregations, and allowing their institutions to be controlled, rather than informed, by the avoidance of risk and the ticking of boxes. Vans and their like are signs of life and faithfulness.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.