Ready, Healthy, Eat!
Duration
2020 - 2023
Team
Dr. Luke Owen (2020-2022), Dr. Lopa Saxena and Prof. Moya Kneafsey
Funder
National Lottery Community Fund
Collaborators
Real Farming Trust
CAWR Themes
Community Self-Organisation for Resilience
Policies and Institutions for Resilience
Sustainable Development Goal
Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing
Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Goal 10: Reduced Inequality
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
Goal 12: Responsble Production and Consumption
Project Overview
The impact of nutritionally poor food is affecting the most vulnerable the most. Children in poorer areas are almost twice as likely to be obese as their counterparts in more affluent areas.
Local food projects work in these communities, delivering social impact by encouraging changes in people’s diets through projects that encourage people to grow food and cook more. However, only some people will want or can take up these opportunities. Local food projects are ideally placed to move beyond growing and cooking to impact the diets of those people who, for different reasons, can’t or won’t cook and grow for themselves.
This project brings together five established local community food projects throughout the UK that will trial different ideas for improving the nutritional value of the cooked food eaten by the most vulnerable groups in their community.
CAWR’s role in this multi-partner project was to evaluate the social impact of the overall RHE programme by examining the initiatives that each of the five projects delivered. We adopted a mixed-method, collaborative approach so that the design, delivery, and assessment of social impact is embedded into the Ready Healthy Eat project.
Impact
We built on the social impact toolkit developed in previous research projects (see Power To Change and Co-developing a social impact toolkit) to evaluate the social impact of Ready Healthy Eat, with a particular focus on the following questions:
- What impact does the project have on access to good quality food by people who are at risk of food poverty?
- What impact does the project have on the physical and mental (wellbeing) health of the different beneficiaries (trainees and consumers of the ready meals)?
- Does the project impact the beneficiaries' ability to make healthier food choices beyond the project itself?
- What is the impact of the project on community cohesion?
- How effectively does the project support and promote local employment?
- What impact does the project have on the environment? eg through using food that would be wasted, using compostable packaging, using local supply chains.
