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Healthy Living

Cambridgeshire has areas where it is known the rate of poor health is significantly higher than the national average. Key risk factors causing health inequalities include smoking, obesity, physically inactive lifestyles and poor diet.

In addition, health inequalities are often passed from one generation to another due to poor living conditions, poverty and lack of basic skills.

Cambridgeshire ACRE works with all age groups to deliver healthy living messages using established community development principles and a partnership approach.

Good Food for Cambridgeshire
This project is working with primary, secondary schools and targeted local communities in the areas of Wisbech and Ramsey to deliver the message of healthy eating to children, young people and their families.

The project does this by establishing food gardens within schools or in the community and teaching community members the skills they need to plant and grow their own produce. Key messages such as the importance of eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and taking physical activity are promoted. Alongside this activity we run cookery workshops, where parents and carers are taught to use basic ingredients and the produce they/their children have grown to cook healthy meals on a tight budget.

Sustainability is important to this project and part of the work includes equipping local community members with the skills to maintain the gardens in the longer term after our day-to-day support is no longer available.

The Good Food Project is currently supported by the BIG Lottery via the Wellbeing in the East Consortium and local partners.

Carry on Cooking
Carry on Cooking is a three year project to help boost healthy eating for older people by putting the fun back into shopping for food and cooking meals.

Carry on Cooking is a partnership project working with Age Concern Cambridgeshire and funded by the BIG Lottery Fund via the Fit as a Fiddle Age Concern Consortium.

Carry on Cooking will try to educate groups of older people on modern nutrition ideas and identify and tackle the problems they may face when trying to cook healthily within their own homes.

The project has an initial pilot phase to develop a toolkit of techniques for engaging with older people at Age Concern-run day centres to see what works and what doesn't. The learning will then be shared with other organisations across the region so that they can start similar projects themselves.

To learn more about these programmes of work, please contact Kirsten Bennett on 01353 865041.