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Healthy Holidays 2022

28 April 2022

Healthy Holidays funds projects that provide fun activities and nutritious food for children during the school holidays. This year, Leeds Community Foundation have partnered with Leeds City Council to deliver Healthy Holidays as part of the broader Department for Education Holiday Activities and Food programme. 

Tackling food insecurity and hunger, isolation and inactivity, Healthy Holidays funds Community Organisations across the city to provide face-to-face activities and hot meals over the Easter, Summer and Christmas holidays. The programme focuses on supporting children who are eligible for Free School Meals. 

In February this year, 48 grants were awarded to Community Organisations across the city, with over £870,000 invested in total. A full list of the organisations that were awarded funding can be found at the bottom of this page. 

Now in its fifth year, the Healthy Holidays programme is a real asset to communities and families across Leeds. During the Summer holidays last year, over 9,000 children took part in Healthy Holidays projects and organisations provided over 145,000 portions of food. 

One of those organisations, Connecting Crossgates, delivered ‘Freedom Summer Club’ with a broad range of activities including sports, crafts, den building, balloon modelling, mask making, growing sunflowers, face painting, music-time, dance and volleyball. Over 220 children and young people attended, and each child was also provided with a weekly food hamper to take home and share with their family. 

Connecting Crossgates said “J, a single mum living on a council estate, brought her 3 primary school aged children to the summer club. She was struggling to engage with them, finding it hard to find things for them to do and concerned about feeding them over the holidays. She said ‘I’m so glad you’ve run this summer club – I don’t know what I would have done without it.’” 

We look forward to sharing more about the impact that Healthy Holidays has on individuals across Leeds throughout 2022. 

For more information on grants awarded, visit the What We’ve Funded page. 

 

Here are the 48 projects that were funded this year: