Dine it Forward Campaign

Thank you to all our donors, we have met our fundraising goal.

We were so excited when we came up with the idea for Dine It Forward, we knew it was going to be a fun campaign to run as the majority of the team are foodies. We are looking forward to all the food ‘research’ we can do!

The way the campaign works is that we want people to host a meal for their friends and ask them to contribute an amount to Palmera for the meal. The name Dine it Forward came from the term Pay it Forward. It is all about doing something good to another when someone does something good for you. In this case, when you have hosted a friend or a family member, rather than them inviting you to do the same, they host someone else. Each time, as a thank you, money is raised for those who need it most.

One night after a big ‘research meal’ the team were brain storming how we could make it easier for people to host their own meals and we came up with the brilliant idea of a little ‘pack’ we could send them. The packs includes some recipe cards of Sri Lankan meals, spices they could use to cook the recipes and a CD they could show their guests on Palmera and where the money they donated would be going.

To kick off the campaign we are hosting three events ourselves for the general public. The three events will take place at City Hotel in Sydney where we will serve a full three course Sri Lankan meal. We will also have two chefs Paul Van Ryek and Manuja Fernano cater these meals and also speak to us about Sri Lankan food.

We had another brilliant idea to give all the guests who attend our events a pack to inspire them to host their own events. In these packs we also included some homemade Sri Lankans sweets. The packs where a great idea but we had plenty a late night putting them together and a few cooking fails trying to perfect the Sri Lankan sweets. All up we had to make more than 200 packs!! Not too sure if everyone in the team still thinks it’s a brilliant idea.

We thought it would also be fun to have some food inspired games on the night, so we organised a ‘guess the spice’ game where you guessed it, guests had to guess which ground spice was which.

We also asked the chefs to do some interactive lessons on how to make some simple entrees.

We are very excited to be launching this campaign, we have already sold out of tickets for all three of our launch events and hope that all our long nights organizing will pay off!