The young people serving your food and drink are students at the MacKillop School in Geelong.
Our MacKillop Education school in Geelong supports young people who find learning and going to school a major challenge. Our students have unique learning needs, many with social and emotional challenges that mainstream schools find difficult to support.
MacKillop Education provides these young people with opportunities to learn and thrive, in safe and supportive environments that encourage academic and social success.
The Bittersweet food truck offers a creative learning opportunity.
The mobile café is the extension of a clever initiative that launched at the Geelong school in 2018.
Thinking of an innovative way to get senior students interested in coming to school, teachers came up with the Bittersweet project and launched a small school café catering to fellow students and teachers.
The café offered an alternate way to learn traditional subjects like maths and English. Measuring and weighing ingredients to cook muffins helped to understand numeracy, while writing out a menu required reading and spelling skills. Working as a team also helped to develop social and problem-solving abilities.
Buoyed by the café’s success, in 2023, the Bittersweet team set its sights on a bigger dream – to take its café on the road, delivering a menu of tasty treats and drinks to the local Geelong community.
Today, the brightly coloured Bittersweet food truck can be spotted at a variety of local sites, including the Bellarine Living and Learning Centre at Whittington. Plans are underway to extend its community reach in 2025.
With the project aligned to the Victorian Education and Training (VET) certificate, senior students have the opportunity to complete a range of certified industry courses, like barista training, food handling and safety, and First Aid, along with learning practical hospitality skills, all of which will help with future training or employment opportunities.
As one of the project’s founders and VET education trainer, Glenn O’Shannessy, notes: “The best thing about Bittersweet is that it can give the students self-worth. The look on their faces when they are proud of a product they have made or delivered is priceless, and that is what I am trying to teach these students; to have some self-confidence, to know they can make a difference to other people’s day.”
Bittersweet is more than a cup of coffee, toastie or tasty muffin: it’s about giving hope and opportunity to a young person whose life’s pathway hasn’t been – nor is likely to be – an easy walk.
If you see the Bittersweet food truck in your area, be sure to pop by and say hello. In the future, students hope to make the food truck available for catering at local events in the Geelong region. If you would like more information about this, please get in touch with us.
MacKillop Education acknowledges support from the Geelong Community Foundation and the Percy Baxter Charitable Trust (managed by Perpetual) in helping to bring the students’ Bittersweet dream to life.