Community Food Champions

It should be easy for young people to be healthy, but it isn’t. The food system is rigged against us, flooding our world with junk food then putting billions into marketing that makes it impossible to resist. Community Food Champions was created to change this! 

We’ve partnered with UK Youth to deliver Community Food Champions — a programme empowering young people to investigate the challenges they face in accessing healthy and nutritious food in their local area and lead social action projects to make a difference. 

We launched in July 2022 and over 500 young people split into 50 groups from 16 youth organisations across London, Peterborough, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds and Newcastle have been taking part to help achieve a world where all young people have the opportunity to be healthy, no matter where they live.

The Community Food Champions Journey 

Community Food Champions kicked off with launch events around the country. Young people met their fellow regional young campaigners, heard from inspirational members from our Youth Boards, and got fired up about creating change.

Back in their youth groups, they took part in workshops to discover the inequalities and injustices in our food system. They participated in a digital mapping competition to map the prices of food in their local area. Through this competition, they were exposed to the differences in food accessibility around the country. With prizes up for grabs, they competed against other groups nationally and collectively logged 2,700 food items.

Each group then started planning what they wanted to change about their local food environment. They developed their leadership skills, learning about their strengths and personal leadership styles. They built their campaigning skills by learning about campaign strategy and mapping the key stakeholders who could help them with their project ideas. Communication skills were developed as the groups learnt how to share their lived experiences and use storytelling to bring the need for their campaign to life.

In November 2022, we held six regional pitch events where the young people presented their insights and social action campaign ideas to a panel of Bite Back staff, young activists and local stakeholders.

Grants have been awarded to 17 groups to implement their campaign ideas in 2023. Some examples of their brilliant campaigns include: 

• SkyWay in London are campaigning for children from Peckham to have access to one hot, nutritious meal a day without worrying about what it costs. To do this, they plan to offer affordable, healthy meals in their local youth club to cut through the flood of cheap, unhealthy takeaway options that currently dominate their local high street.
• Sheffield Wednesday FC Community Foundation are campaigning to remove junk food advertisement from billboards and increase the availability of healthier food options at their local stadium.
• NCS Changemakers in Peterborough are encouraging youth clubs across the city to offer healthy and affordable snack and drink options.
• Downhill Diamonds, a group from NE Youth in Newcastle are campaigning to remove junk food advertisements from bus stops outside of their local schools. 

Do you have any questions? For more information, please contact kaya.carter@biteback2030.com 

*The #iwill Fund is made possible thanks to a £66 million joint investment from the National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high-quality social action opportunities.