The ARC Healthy Living Centre in Irvinestown has recently been awarded €9,000 of funding a year for three years from safefood, which will go towards supporting low-income families in the local community, particularly during the current cost of living crisis.

The ARC Healthy Living Centre is one of 13 community projects across the island of Ireland to be awarded a share of €620,000 funding to help transform the shopping and healthy eating habits of low-income communities across the area. The investment is part of safefood’s Community Food Initiatives (CFI) Programme 2022-2024.

The centre exists to promote benefit to the local community through the provision of additional services around health improvements and harm reduction.

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With the funding from safefood, the team will focus on helping those most in need to gain skills in healthy eating, cooking and meal planning.

Speaking about their involvement in the programme, Jenny Irvine, Chief Executive Officer of the ARC Healthy Living Centre, said: “We welcome our involvement with the Community Food Initiative, as it will provide us with a platform for the promotion of good nutrition, knowledge and skills which will assist families and contribute to the reduction in some health inequalities.”

Recently, safefood held a focus group with parents at the ARC Healthy Living Centre, which Jenny described as “fantastic”.

“They were really talking about messages and what would resonate with families. It was really good that real people were giving the real messages because the impact is on their homes and families,” said Jenny, adding: “Even the language that is used around campaigns moving forward, that our local families had their voices heard.

“They were talking about their real difficulties and they were so brave talking about the challenges they are facing.

“They are universal challenges in relation to what is going on at the minute,” she said, acknowledging the current cost of living crisis.

 

Adds value

She continued, commenting that the ARC Healthy Living Centre team are “really excited” because the funding boost really adds value to what they are doing.

“At the minute there’s real issues within communities so we are hoping in some way we can add some value to what we do.

“It’s not just the funding, it’s the resources through safefood will enable us to get things like cookery books with low-cost, high-nutritional recipes.”

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Jenny went on to explain that with the money, the centre will run a number of events.

“Really it’s introducing people to maybe foods that they mightn’t necessarily have tried. Particularly with kids, you’re really reluctant to buy something if you think the kids won’t eat it.

“We also have some support to bring in nutritionists. They are quite specific that they have to be qualified nutritionists or a dietician that comes in to [give] the information but they have resources to be able to that.

“We keep it very fun as well.

“When we went down to the [safefood] launch, one of the things we realised was that even though there was a lot of science behind what they did, there was also a lot of logic and they knew that they had to go into communities and be relevant,” she said.

The safefood funding aims to help each of the projects to set up, manage and sustain their own community food scheme aimed at positively influencing healthy eating habits of residents by developing their skills and knowledge around food, healthier shopping and cooking skills.

“It’s not a preachy or teachy type approach in any way, it’s real families, real people, real issues and trying to put extra resources in which will just make it a wee bit better,” Jenny said.