Staff Bite – Tegan: A Decade of Dedication

As SecondBite celebrates its 20-year anniversary, we shine a spotlight on our dedicated National Operations Manager Tegan Barker.

In 2014, after dedicating herself to full-time parenting, Tegan wanted to ease back into the workforce. She took a casual job as a SecondBite van driver in Queensland, which allowed her to work just a few hours per week.

Little did she know that she would still be working for SecondBite over a decade later.

When Tegan started, SecondBite Queensland was collecting approximately 614,000 kgs of food annually – last year, that number was 6.25 million kgs – a 900 per cent increase in food collection.

“When I started, there was no office,” Tegan explained. “We parked our vans in the driveway at the State Manager’s home and dropped off the keys in his living room. We had to pick up and drop off food on the same day – there was nowhere to store anything.”

By 2016, Tegan was warehouse supervisor, loading and unloading trucks, and driving the forklift.

“I was showing the fellas how it was done,” says Tegan with a good-natured grin.

Her career continued to progress, and today she serves as Head of National Operations, overseeing the collection and distribution of approximately 25 million kgs of food annually. Read more in our Annual Impact Report here.

Asked what has changed over the past decade, Tegan explained that SecondBite’s operational function is ‘a completely different beast’.

“There is a lot more structure and intentional planning,” she said. “We ask ourselves ‘Where do we want to be?’ and then set about putting the structures in place to make that happen.

“The core of why we do what we do is still the same, but we have a lot more impact now. The way we do things now is much more sustainable for the future.”

Tegan said she was extremely proud of the organisation’s progression in the past decade.

“I can honestly say, I never thought this scale would have been achievable. And now, with the merger with FareShare – we are working together, our goals aligned. I think we will be unstoppable with what we can do.”