Holiday Activities and Food annual report

Nutritional education and promotion of healthy living / lifestyles

Our Pop Up Kitchens continue to be well used and have clocked up some miles as they travel between Gateshead HAF clubs. Their use falls into two main categories:

children cooking their own meal for that day, generally their own lunch
children cooking a meal to take home to enjoy with their families

We have found that when the children cook the lunch they are more likely to eat that meal, even if they didn't personally cook it that day.

As the kits are not used by HAF in term time, we have loaned them out to youth clubs and Adult learning programmes to further increase nutritional education for the good of the community.

Our Christmas remote delivery in 2023 included the delivery of 600 Feeding Families Hampers. To include the physical activity requirement each hamper included the card game 'Snap Fit'. We also developed a recipe which used, pasta, carrots and cheese (all hamper ingredients) which was packed into the hamper for families to cook together in the Christmas break along with the required cupcake cases.

Chartwells continue to provide some cooking lessons for children attending clubs on their sites in Gateshead as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility Programme.

Bushtucker Trials have been a really popular way of encouraging children to try new textures and flavours. We've seen children trying red pepper and peas for the first time and then gone on to really love them. A local chef often brings a smoothie bike to some clubs which means we can discuss food waste at the same time as delivering messages on nutrition.

Finally the resources on the GULP website have proven popular in the post lunch period at clubs to interactively illustrate the sugar content of many popular drinks.

Cooking advice

16 pop up cooking kits were purchased to allow providers the opportunity to provide pop up cooking classes at their venue.

A member of the Gateshead HAF team demonstrated the use of the portable cooking kits.

HAF Providers' Forum

Eighteen providers from across Gateshead attended our first Gateshead HAF Providers forum on Wednesday 10 May 2023. The focus of the event was to ensure that the HAF programme was serving the needs of Gateshead's children and their families.

We discussed: "What to do" and "Who to involve" to improve their HAF offer.