Waste not want not

Watching good food go to waste sent Ronni Kahn on a mission. Now more than half a million meals have been served to the hungry in Sydney alone.

Running a successful business while being a wife and mother of two sons would be enough for most of us, but not for Ronni Kahn. A sense of obligation to repay her good fortune in life combined with a deepening disgust for the waste she witnessed on a daily basis led her around the globe on a mission to set up OzHarvest.

“I was restless to do something,” explains Ronni. “I felt so privileged. I work hard, bloody hard, and that feels good. I have two healthy sons I adore, a business that I made work, and a wonderful husband, but I just felt like I needed to do more.” When she says, “do more”, what Ronni really means is ‘give more’, and in her quest to make a difference in some way, she decided to set up a charity that personifies the saying ‘think global, act local’.

Ronni’s business, Ronni Kahn Event Designs is, as its name suggests, a business that revolves around the planning and execution of functions and events and, of course, the provision of vast quantities of food. “My mother always said, ‘Clear your plate; somewhere someone is wasting away’, so I’ve always been conscious of the need to treat food as a precious resource. What people forget is that the hungry don’t just live ‘over there’ – they live in the same place we do.” Ronni’s awareness of the reality of hunger and homelessness was compounded by the casual waste she witnessed. “Through doing events I’d seen so much good food being wasted that, in the end, it just disgusted me. Whenever I could I’d stop on the way home and drop the food off to places like Matthew Talbot [a Sydney hostel for homeless men run by the St Vincent de Paul Society], but regulations and logistics made it increasingly hard to pull off. I felt genuinely outraged by what was happening, but powerless to do anything about it.”

It could have ended right there, with resignation and disgust, but two events conspired to push Ronni down the path to a solution. “In 2004 I spent a couple of days in my home town Johannesburg and I visited with an old friend, Selma Browde.” (Ronni was born in South Africa and made her circuitous way to Australia via 12 years on a kibbutz in Israel.) “Selma is an inspiration,” continues Ronni. “There will be books written about her one day. She’s a doctor and at the age of eighty she’s still a crusader.” Selma has dedicated much of her life to making a difference and it was a reminder of this that urged Ronni not to give up. “On the second day she took me to Soweto to visit an HIV clinic she had set up there. As we were driving along I was talking through my frustration and she said, ‘Just remember, there’s electricity in this township because of what I did’, and I thought, ‘I cannot live another day without making a difference’.”

Ronni’s passion might have remained thwarted were it not for her next trip overseas. “Not long afterwards I was getting ready to visit my sister Margie in LA and I was doing my usual research.” Ronni is a member of ISES (International Special Events Society) and uses its network to organise contact and exchange when she travels. “I looked on the website to check out what was happening in LA and stumbled across the name Angel Harvest. I clicked on the link and there it was, my epiphany.”

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