qsa.org.au
“Quaker Service Australia (QSA), based out of Sydney, Australia, is the service and overseas aid organisation of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia. QSA is a tax exempt charity. Its role is to channel the concern of Australian Quakers for building a more peaceful, equitable, just and compassionate world.”
We currently work with partners in countries throughout the world including Cambodia, India, Indigenous Australia, Malaysia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and with refugee and asylum seeker groups in Australia. QSA has supported work in the areas of health, education and human rights, but the main focus has been in providing people with the skills to create small vegetable gardens and earn a decent livelihood.
Read their Statement of Purpose here.
A recent visit to projects in rural Cambodia has revealed impressive home food gardens established using permaculture training supported by Quaker Service Australia (QSA) in partnership with the Australian government’s Australian NGO Cooperation Program. Over the past eight months, many women have achieved flourishing gardens providing them with better food security and improvements to overall health. Some women are already selling surplus harvest in the local markets, and even small quantities are popular due to the quality of their organically grown leafy green vegetables, beans, chillies, herbs, and a range of fruit trees such as bananas, papaya, mangoes, and milkfruit.
To enable this, QSA projects have assisted with the provision of wells, water storage devices, and building of small‐scale channels to make good use of rainfall as a clean water supply when it comes, and to store what they need for the dry season.
Through QSA, meetings and Friends are able to support these rural Cambodian communities that have limited resources: for example, helping more community members have access to a household toilet. Their increased knowledge in health, hygiene, and dietary nutrition has served to improve the wellbeing and energy levels of everyone in the community, including lower incidences of illness, healthier newborns, and increased school attendance for children.