Making a difference with Tall Poppy and OzHarvest

Just on two weeks ago, Electrolight was invited to join the Tall Poppy Collective, a team of design professionals recently founded as a not-for-profit creative outlet venture. Focusing on functional pop-up style designs targeting community and environmental issues, the Tall Poppy Collective (led by architect Kylie Soltani) has an ethos of re-use / recycle / re-purpose.

The inaugural Tall Poppy Collective project was a partnership with OzHarvest, creating the backdrop to the charity’s 8th birthday celebration and launch of the OzHarvest Cook book.

OzHarvest is a non-denominational charity that rescues excess food which would otherwise be discarded. This excess food is distributed to charities supporting the vulnerable in Sydney, Newcastle, Adelaide and Brisbane. Currently in Sydney OzHarvest delivers over 320, 000 meals per month with a fleet of 11 vehicles. Australia wide OzHarvest delivers 441,500 meals per month with a fleet of 15 vans. This equates to 147 tonnes each month.

This event was a thank you to over 300 primary supporters of OzHarvest, celebrating 15 million meals and diverting over 5 million kilograms of food from landfill over it’s 8 years of operation. It was also a celebration for the launch of the first ever OzHarvest Cook Book, with 120 recipes from 44 of the country’s most popular chefs such as Neil Perry and Bill Granger. Every dollar raised from the sale of the cookbook goes directly to feeding those in need.

The Electrolight Sydney team pulled together a couple of car loads of salvaged luminaires and threw their creative skills at lighting the event space, a warehouse in Alexandria full of vintage and nostalgic fair equipment. The warehouse was then furnished entirely by salvaged materials and furniture by the Tall Poppy Collective team, pulled together in a series of weekend workshops over the past few weeks.

The result was a massive success. The atmosphere was electric, the food delicious, and the eftpos machine crashed from the number of book sales.

Did you miss out on snaffling the cookbook? Fear not, just click here to make one yours…

The atmosphere (and the lights) were electric