Another benefit to the legions of young footballers descending upon Inverell for the 2016 Joeys Mini World Cup was an act of charity.
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The week-long spring soccer tournament has been collecting funds to give to charity each year. This year, the founder Heinrich Haussler presented a cheque for $2480 to the Inverell Community Gardens. Heinrich felt the ambition of a healthy event, inclusion, human relationships and community was inextricable between the two projects.
“If you take all these other organisations, your organisation, and my organisation away, and you say, ‘There’s a football, and there’s a vegetable’ – and if people, who only can look like this, they see a football, and a vegetable,” he said.
“But what this football and this vegetable creates, all around this community, is mind-boggling. And that’s what we want people to understand; that they can see that vision; that they can live that vision with us.”
He said both the Cup and the garden strove to achieve benchmarks for the entire community and ability involvement, and places for people to feel valued and aspire to their best health. Garden committee member Jane O’Brien agreed the two projects were walking philosophically side-by-side.
“I think there is a real synergistic relationship here, basically, the goals, the objectives, what the Mini World Cup is all about is the same as what the Community Gardens are all about,” Jane said. She felt grateful for the contribution to the burgeoning community project, which hopes to grow even more with a potential move and expansion.
“For the Inverell Community Gardens, this is extremely exciting, and I think because we have the same vision,” she said. “This is going to take it to the next level, and the money goes toward bedding down the programs that we’ve already got running.”