Our annual Soup festival came back to life on Sunday 11 September after being cancelled for the last couple of years due to Covid. The Soup festival uses the product from our communal garden to create food that we can share with our community, along with live music, market stalls and workshops. This year we had nearly 500 people come through to reconnect and celebrate community.
The soup festival is important to us and our community. It’s fantastic to invite people in to have a good time, to share in the produce from the SEEDS communal garden, to buy things from the stalls, have a meal, attend a workshop and listen to live music but its also a lot more than that. Its about bringing people together to reconnect after lots of time apart. Its about Milparinka being, not just a disability service that only welcomes people with different needs, but a community place shared with everyone in our community. When that sharing happens the people who we love and support get more opportunities to meet and share space, friendships, conversations and experiences with a lot more people. Meeting more good people in your life and having more experiences is a good thing to do and for most people it gives them better stories to tell in their lives.
On Sunday a many more than half of the people who attended had nothing to do with Milparinka. They were just community members who came along to have a nice time. They didn’t come into our place to help anybody, they didn’t come in to look after someone with a disability, there was no focus on difference, it was just people sharing space. It is in these times, where people are sharing space together and not trying to fix someone all of the time that the best cultures, conversations and opportunities start and grow from. When you are in a place and a culture that is more broadly focused, and has a much richer and deeper vein of inputs and relationships, then better things happen.
