Our Food Champions Programme with Kind Communities Kind Food

We recently completed our Food Champions programme in collaboration with Kind Communities Kind Food, a Warwickshire County Council initiative designed to improve food security, support healthy eating and encourage sustainable, local food choices. The programme combined nutritional education with community support to help reduce food waste, increase affordability and build confidence around preparing nutritious meals.

Throughout the programme, we delivered a series of workshops led by local nutritionists, Warwickshire Public Health colleagues and the Forest of Hearts team. These sessions took place both in the Lomas Community Room and in the Garden of Wellbeing at Stratford-upon-Avon Hospital, creating a welcoming environment where members of the community could explore the connections between food, health, mental wellbeing and everyday choices.

Participants learned about the Warwickshire Food Strategy, community cooking skills, the impact of poor diet on health, special dietary needs, growing their own food, composting, and the wider challenges facing Warwickshire in relation to diet and health inequalities.

To support people during the cost-of-living crisis, the programme also provided practical tools for cooking on a budget, with participants receiving air fryers and slow cookers to help them prepare healthy meals at home.

We concluded the programme with a celebration at The Garden of Arden, where each participant received a certificate of achievement presented by The Deputy Mayor Cllr Sam McNaught-Barrow. It was a warm and uplifting moment that recognised the commitment and curiosity shown by everyone involved and our newest graduates of the programme also had the opportunity to meet some of the thirty four Food Champions from Warwickshire who were also in attendance.

We would like to offer our sincere thanks to Mike Slemensek and Rina Sarna for helping to organise the speakers and workshop leads, to Amy Upchurch for coordinating the use of the Lomas Community Room, and to James Morrison, Michelle Wykes, Tamorah Lassam-Jones, Sian Owen and Jon Knight for their invaluable contributions throughout the programme.