“RIGHT ON TRACK” Cafe

Our dream is to renovate train carriages, transforming them into a Café which employees young locals to serve healthy food, drink and barista coffee.

We have been successful in securing this project and would like to thank all the people that voted for us, firstly our community, TAFE, the Reiby Juvenile Justice partnership to deliver this dream and Sydney Trains/Transport NSW Government for helping make it happen.

Right on Track Café will provide training and employment opportunities to local youth while promoting a healthier lifestyle to community. This is a social enterprise project enabling youth to run and operate the café – Our future leaders. Right on Track Café will integrate with Tharawals other healthy lifestyle programs promoting a healthier way of living to community.

We needed to do something for our young people, to get them through training and become apprentices quicker, so sparked the idea from something similar we had seen before at the Land Council, who converted train carrages into accomodation.

The Right on Track café will have the dual role of providing a formal training program while facilitating a significant community engagement opportunity.

Presently access to fresh healthy food and drink is not available to Tharawal staff and Airds residents. Once the project is complete young people will be able to operate the café by providing healthy food and drink to the local community and cater for meetings.

We believe this will be exciting for our younger community and make more young people get involved with healthy food and lifestyles like some of our other healthy lifestyle programs.

There are no cafes in Airds, the closure of the nearby shopping centre has seen a decline in local business and getting the essentials locally. This is where Right On Track will help the community.

The proposed Train Carriage project at Tharawal is part of an integrated program to develop a social enterprise program designed to improve issues related to Aboriginal youth employment while concurrently addressing issues related to food security in the wider community. This will provide a central focus for the Community around the issue of healthy lifestyles and healthy eating.

Once the carrages are in place, there will be a landscape of rainforest around the trains and the cafe areas providing a beautiful area to rest and get a hot cup of coffee made by our young people.

Tharawal will be partnering with TAFE, Reiby Juvenile Justice, and the local Community. Once the carriages are delivered they will be renovated as part of a course delivered through TAFE. Concurrently TAFE will be running a Food Handling and Barista course for young Aboriginal people. These students will be Tharawals prospective employees. Ultimately a functional cafe would be available to community members.

This is just one of the programs undergoing at Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation. The community can look forward to the future with programs such as book clubs, debating classses, public speaking, report writing, we are looking to partner with the ABC and SBS to teach young people how to interview, launch a radio station to connect to other communities and provide opportunities for our young community, Gyms, landscaping, and rebuilding our offices to be more modern and environmentally friendly.

These are just a few of the projects to look forward to from Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation in 2021 and beyond.