Julie Dunbabin

Julie is the School Lunch Project Manager at the non-government organisation School Food Matters. She was the Executive Officer at School Food Matters for 11 years prior to this. She has expertise in food, nutrition, and health promotion. Her work has focused on how to change traditional food in school canteens to a sit-down lunch opportunity, with food cooked from scratch using local and seasonal produce. Changing food culture for the better in our schools.

Julie was awarded the inaugural ‘Elvie Munday’ Churchill Fellowship in 2018 to travel in 2019 to England, Scotland, France, Italy, Finland, Japan, and the USA - Washington D.C and Chicago, to ‘Research factors that enable school lunch programs to impact positively on student health and wellbeing’.

Since ‘bringing knowledge home’ she has secured funding for a feasibility study to provide school lunches in three schools. This was evaluated by the Menzies Institute for Medical Research. Built on this evaluation and advocacy by Julie and her team, the Tasmanian State Government has funded an expansion to the feasibility study to provide a sit down, cooked from scratch lunch, for students in 15 schools in 2022. This will be expanded to a further 15 schools in 2023. The involvement of the 30 schools will be evaluated to determine the impact of providing school lunches; school attendance, student connectedness, learning outcomes, preferred meals that have been designed by Community Dietitians involved in the project, parent feedback and school staff feedback.  

Julie has a Bachelor of Education from Victoria College, a Graduate Diploma of Health Education from Queensland University of Technology, and a Graduate Diploma of Primary Health Care from Flinders University.