Industry Partnerships Spotlight: Multicultural Communities Council of SA

In 2019, the International Research Collective for Food Culture & Health teamed up with the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia on a joint project to measure the impacts of Lunch Clubs hosted by Ukrainian, Chinese, Greek and Italian community centres.

This project highlighted the positive benefits that can be achieved when industry, in this case, community centres, work closely with researchers. Not only did the project give community centres valuable feedback about their Lunch Club programs, it provided robust and evidence-based findings about the impacts and benefits of these lunch clubs that can be used to demonstrate how valuable and important they are at building a sense of belonging, enhancing social inclusion and to maintaining a positive cultural identity.

The work of the International Research Collective for Food, Culture & Health revealed the findings above. Researchers used focus groups to capture qualitative data from participants. This method enabled researchers to connect with participants and hear about their opinions, feelings and experiences of the lunch clubs. This generated a rich data set for researchers to analyse and, as you can see, the findings reinforced how highly valued lunch clubs were at building friendships, cultural connections and communication.

Our researchers are always looking to partner with community organisations, businesses, NGOs and agencies to help solve real world problems around food, culture and health research that can be translated into useful reports, programs and process improvements. Funding often exists to support the costs of linkage projects like this one, and we work with you to design a project that suits your organisation's needs and resources.

Does your organisation have a burning question about a food, culture or health related issue that could benefit from a research partnership? If you think so, then drop us a line at ircfch@gmail.com to start a connection.