Healthy Holidays

This year the Feeding Bristol Healthy Holidays campaign was about providing more than just food to the city’s children. As well as providing food resources Feeding Bristol with The Children’s Kitchen provided additional support through educational information and videos, and food sessions for families, working with many partner organisations to deliver the project. This encourages parents to feed their children healthy, nutritious meals (in conjunction with the free school meals voucher for older children) as well as providing resources on food, activity and wellbeing education.

During the Summer of 2020 The Children’s Kitchen has coordinated and delivered key aspects of the Feeding Bristol Healthy Holidays programme. This has included:

• Working with partners 91ways and Square Food Foundation The Children’s Kitchen has developed a series of recipes and cookery videos to inspire children of all ages to cook at home. The videos feature Bristol cooks and their children from 91ways, Square Food Foundation and KnowleDGE. The recipes are also available as printable PDFs and the cookery videos have subtitles which are translated into 16 languages-just click on the settings when playing the video to see them in Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, English, French, Hungarian, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Somali, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.

• For the recipes and videos please visit feedingbristol.org/thechildrenskitchen

• Running 43 Family Food Sessions with Partners Organisations in play settings, farms, Children’s Centres and community centres. These sessions were open to families who access FOOD Clubs or Playful Bristol sessions over the holidays. Families were supported to create a healthy lunch and also took home recipes and a bag of fresh produce. These sessions were held with Covid 19 restrictions so they were socially distanced with families working on their own table, with a maximum of six families at a time.

• Each week during the holidays Activity Bags were distributed to 750 vulnerable families through FOOD Clubs, Playful Bristol and referrals from Families in Focus. These were a different theme every week: Sport, Reading Books, Creativity, Growing and Food. The Children’s Kitchen created the Food Packs which contained recipe booklets, spices oil and store cupboard basics and the Growing Packs which included seeds, compost, pots, magnifying glass and nature activities.

Watch the Feeding Bristol’s Healthy Holidays 2020 Video Here.