The Australian’s Australian of the Year: Food relief founder Ronni Kahn nurtured resilience

When crises hit, people worry about food. That’s a lesson from 2020 that nobody could have predicted more than Oz Harvest founder Ronni Kahn.

Oz Harvest founder Ronni Kahn. Picture: John Feder

Supermarket scenes of shoppers in panic-buying frenzies became familiar on TV screens across the world when COVID-19 first hit in March, with people tussling over cans of tomatoes and packets of spaghetti.

When crises hit, people worry about food. That’s a lesson from 2020 that nobody could have predicted more than Oz Harvest founder Ronni Kahn.

Ms Kahn has been grappling with the issue of food security since 2004, when she was running a successful events business and noticed huge volumes of food going to waste. Executing a simple solution to a complex problem, she bought a van and started delivering some of the food to local charities to stop the alternative happening: perfectly good food going to waste.

App users tap here to nominate your Australian of the Year

From one van to an army, Ms Kahn built Oz Harvest into what it is today, an essential service that picks up surplus food and redistributes it to charities, and has established itself as Australia’s leading food rescue organisation.

Yet in a year that exposed the need for food relief charities to exist — with more people facing food insecurity because of economic effects of the pandemic — emergency and relief charities such as Oz Harvest were at high risk of not being able to deliver necessary services.

Oz Harvest, along with many others in the charity sector, faced a dramatic drop in donations and lower volunteering with everyone in lockdown, but a rising demand forced it to buy food for the first time. Yet even in the difficult year, Oz Harvest was a story of resilience. In 2020, it diverted 6.3 million kilos of food from landfill, equal to more than 22.1 million meals delivered to charities.

In the way she fostered resilience in a testing time, Ms Kahn is a deserving nominee as this year’s The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

We encourage our readers to put in a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year, which was first won in 1971 by economist HC “Nugget” Coombs. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the coupon above, or sending an email to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Thursday, January 21.