What is Winter HAF?
YMCA Y-Kidz kicked the year off by delivering an excellent Winter HAF provision over the school holidays. The programme is targeted to support children and young people who receive free school meals, offering a safe and supportive environment where they can learn, be active and eat well, as well as make new friends locally.
Our Impact
Our Y-Kidz team got to work to ensure children were engaged and fed well over the winter holidays.
We prepared 112 food and activity packs. The packs supported 72 children under Y-Kidz HAF and a further 40 children under Derby County Community Trust HAF.
Each box contained fresh ingredients accompanied by recipe cards. An additional 48 family sized ingredients bags were supplied so that children and parent/carers could cook a chilli together.
A parent said, “My child loved cooking the chilli, we cooked it at his sister’s house as we were visiting and wanted to share it with her. Flapjacks to follow tonight!”
Our team hosted dance classes and families had access to DCCT online activity sessions, with Derby Country’s Rammie making a special appearance!
“Whilst we were disappointed that we couldn’t go ahead with the face to face delivery of the HAF project, we worked as a team internally and with external partners to pull together an extensive offer of activities for our families. This included live workshops in dance, cooking, creative arts and STEM subjects. We also provided pre-recorded materials such as stories animated and read by team members, and health and fitness workout sessions. A range of competitions ran throughout for the families to test and trial.”
“It was so lovely meeting the families every morning on the live welcome meeting to hear about what they had been doing. Some families took up all the activities and shared photos of the food they were cooking which was really great to see. It was a pleasure to manage the project alongside a team of brilliant staff, who pulled the stops out to make it a success for those involved.“
We had so much fun and can’t wait for next time! 
