NEWS FEATURE
Food for thought in the library
As communities brace for the cost-of-living crisis, a library service shares its experience of getting involved in the Government-funded Holiday Activities and Food programme, and how it opened the doors to a lost generation of library users.
THE Holiday Activities and Food Programme (HAF) pro- vides a meal and activities in a safe and secure environment to children entitled to free school meals.
It was started to help families that needed free school meals to continue through the holiday period. During Covid lockdowns, when no school meant no free school meals, it was championed by footballer Marcus Rashford as a possible solution. In Kent, the organisers of the HAF programme in the Thanet area asked their public libraries to get involved. Lucy Kennedy, Customer Service Development librarian for Thanet Libraries, says she had worked with Natasha Brown, a fitness trainer and the HAF organiser in the area, on another project.
“She remembered how useful libraries had been and wanted to get us involved. My understanding was that most of the activities on offer were mainly sport-focused so there was no obvious link to the library services at first. But then I had the idea to give children certificates for reading – to get them involved in the Summer Reading Challenge – a wonderful option, especially if sport isn’t your thing.”
The first session was an outreach programme at one of the HAF sites, partly because of lockdown. HAF had 130 children signed up and were get- ting between 50 and 80 children in per day. Lucy said about 50 children completed a “summer reading bingo certificate” over breakfast and were given resources to create a window display for the library, based on a book they had chosen (The Snail and The Whale).
“We also had books about food as 14 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
part of their healthy eating food education and to encourage everyone to live well. So, as well as reading The Runaway Pea, they loved looking at the cookery books and talking about what was good or bad for them.”
Christmas
A Christmas session took place at the library. “For a lot of them it was their first visit to a library,” Lucy says: “That day we gave them books with a ‘this book belongs to’ label so they could write their name in it. For our Christmas session I gifted 150 books. And for the healthy food element they each got an orange, an apple or a banana – so they could choose a piece of fruit and a book to take home. HAF also walked a group of 11- to 16-year-olds to Margate Library. They were really sur- prised when the teenagers naturally went and chose a book and sat on the comfy chairs and started reading quietly. One of them asked us, ‘Are we allowed to come and hang out here any time?’, which was really important to us for signposting safe, free spaces that teenagers can go to.”
Money
Lucy said Kent Libraries made a small pot of money available for the project adding: “These were hard to reach children; the project was for 4- to 16-year-olds but most of the ones we were dealing with were pri- mary and junior age. So, one bonus was getting them early and talking to them about libraries. At that age they just love and enjoy everything. They were so excit- ed to come into the library. It took your breath away, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as well.”
Some of the activities were to encourage children to keep on thinking about the li- brary, like the window display “I was keen for them to do it because it makes them part of the library community. Every- one is welcome in the library, it is their
April-May 2022
library and they can see something they have done in the window. It is about that outcome, that the library is for everybody and can help people who don’t have easy access to books. Many of them had never come into our libraries before but I hope that they’ve gone home and said to their parents ‘I went to the library today, it was wonderful, can we go again?’”
What next?
Lucy is now talking to HAF organ- isers about Summer 2022 which is likely to be difficult as more families suffer in the cost-of-living crisis. Lucy says: “Libraries are a free resource, available to everybody, so if you’re looking for something to do that’s free, it’s there.
“It was wonderful to make that link between books and healthy eating; these are things that a public library can promote as much as general health and wellbeing books.”
Library window display.
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