Healthy Eagles Kitchen Social supports over 130 youngsters
This summer, the Palace for Life Foundation ran a free holiday club for over 130 local children, providing more than 600 healthy meals and delivering health education workshops for parents and carers.
The Healthy Eagles Kitchen Social ran for five weeks at The Salvation Army in Thornton Heath for children aged between 4 and 11 and included fun games, cooking lessons, dancing and gardening, amongst other activities.
Eight-year-old Ella explained why she attended: “I came to stop me from snacking during the summer holidays. If I didn’t come I would be playing with my tablet and watching TV all day. I went with my best friend, she told me it was really good and they do fun things like planting in the garden.”
Kitchen Social was started by the Mayor’s Fund for London in January 2017 and is run through local community organisations. The concept is to give children and young people a safe place to go during the school holidays where they can socialise, make new friends and get a healthy free meal.
George, 11, attended the full five weeks with the Foundation and enjoyed socialising and playing games: “I can be shy sometimes but I made friends here. The coaches helped me and some other children and they encouraged me to play games with them,” he said.
Healthy Eagles uses the power of Crystal Palace to inspire and encourage young people to lead an active and healthy life. Earlier this year the Healthy Eagles Smoothie Challenge invited young people to design a healthy smoothie recipe for their favourite Palace player. The winner, ‘The Patrick Ban-Aanholt’ was created by 11-year-old Khadijah at the Training Ground for left-back Patrick van Aanholt:
“I was really impressed that the children came up with these recipes for us, you can tell they put a lot of thought into it. I’m obviously pleased that my smoothie was the winner, but I want to congratulate all of them for taking part!”
Health and Wellbeing Manager at Palace for Life Foundation Bethany Towle said: “We launched Healthy Eagles in late 2017 with the aim of encouraging families to lead healthier lifestyles and improve their wellbeing. This is an inclusive programme as we know that children in deprived areas face a range of challenges, from malnourishment to obesity.
“We decided to run Kitchen Social to give young people access to healthy food or physical activity during the school holidays. We were delighted that more than 130 children were able to join us and particularly pleased at the positive reaction from parents.”
Local mum Adzira, whose son attended the sessions, heard about the club from a friend and particularly found the parent workshops useful:
“There’s a lot about health and diet which I found is very helpful because you find out about what they eat. You ask yourself: ‘how much do you really know about your child?’ What do they eat? How much they exercise? How many hours do they actually get to do this?”
Find out more about Healthy Eagles.