The Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) project

The Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) is a Department for Education funded programme offering support to children eligible for free school meals rewarding holiday activities alongside healthy meals over the school holidays. In Southampton there are seventy HAF providers in the city and of these approximately forty are required to deliver nutrition related activities. HAF providers in Southampton engage families on lower incomes, giving them the opportunity to access rewarding and exercise-based activities alongside healthy meals over the Easter, Summer and Christmas school holidays.
Southampton City Council, in partnership with Abri Housing and City Catering Southampton, set up a Cooking and Nutrition Education network to support providers in the community offer good quality healthy eating and nutrition education. Many of the local HAF providers have engaged with the network to access peer to peer support and have highlighted that their lack of expertise in nutrition has meant that the nutrition activities delivered have been limited in scope, novelty and creativity.
In the spirit of the network, this project will be developed as a partnership, pulling on knowledge and resource from across the city by working with the NHS Solent Trust public health nurse team to help us verify and standardise resources, as well as ensuring they are appropriate in a family setting. Similarly, we will be working with a lecturer from Southampton Solent University to not only support with verifying and standardising resources, but also identify gaps and create new resources that fill this. City Catering Southampton will be providing training opportunities to supplement these resources and Abri and SCC public health staff will be aiding the overall coordination and delivery of the project as two key members of the cooking and nutrition network.