Events

Royal North Shore Hospital School provides continuity of education for all students from Kindergarten to Year 12 who are patients at Royal North Shore Hospital. The school offers Individual Learning Programs for students who come from metropolitan and country areas, a range of cultural backgrounds and all sectors of schooling. Students remain enrolled at their census school whilst attending our hospital school. While the school is situated on the children's ward, it also caters for older students who may be on the Orthopaedic, Neurosurgical, Psychiatric, Burns or Spinal Wards.

Vanessa is the Principal at Royal North Shore Hospital School and is a leader in Positive Education and Wellbeing. She is passionate about supporting student’s wellbeing by connecting and understanding the context of student lives.  Vanessa will deliver an empowering talk about RNSH School’s innovative approach to supporting their students whilst in hospital. Vanessa and her team have identified a range of strategies that boost positive wellbeing, and that igniting a sense of purpose through authentic engagement greatly increases human connection and belonging.

Vanessa holds a Master of Special Education (Behaviour and Emotional Difficulties) Bachelor of Education, and Diploma of Positive Psychology.

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John Friedsam is the General Manager of Divisions at Canteen Australia.  John has specialised in psychooncology service provision and management for the past 16 years.   He is passionate about developing and delivering evidenced based, sustainable supportive care, counselling and group work services to cancer patients and their families.  John has also worked extensively in space of the impact of cancer on families, cancer communications and familial adjustment to cancer - most recently, over the past five years with CanTeen, concentrating his work directly adolescents and young adults who are dealing with a cancer diagnosis, that of a family members, or are bereaved due to a cancer related death.

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OzHarvest is Australia’s leading food rescue organisation, collecting quality excess food from commercial outlets and delivering it directly to more than 1300 charities supporting people in need across the country.

Founded in 2004 by Ronni Kahn, after noticing the huge volume of good food going to waste from the hospitality industry, she decided there had to be a better way.  Starting in Sydney with one van – the first of many donations from Goodman+ Foundation – she delivered 4,000 meals in the first month.

OzHarvest now operates nationally, rescuing over 180 tonnes of food each week from over 3,500 food donors including supermarkets, hotels, airports, wholesalers, farmers, corporate events, catering companies, shopping centres, delis, cafes, restaurants, film and TV shoots and boardrooms.

Education is crucial to the business to help enable positive change for vulnerable people. OzHarvest has education programs, NEST and Nourish which Cassie will outline for us. Our new curriculum-aligned education program FEAST for primary school students is currently being piloted, with plans for NSW roll-out this year and nationally in 2020.

OzHarvest has recently opened Australia’s first rescued food supermarket – the OzHarvest Market in Sydney, based on a ‘take what you need, give if you can’ philosophy. There is also a new OzHarvest Food Truck, available for corporate, community and private functions and helping feed communities in need around Sydney.

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