What are Community Champions and what do they do?
Fresh Futures recently secured funding through the Starting Well Initiative to improve Healthy Start engagement and uptake within the more deprived areas of Kirklees.
Using Community Champions, Fresh Futures now offers wider support to external organisations and community groups that are already working with the most in need families to help them access the Healthy Start Scheme and its benefits, including free vitamin supplements.
Fresh Futures employ three Community Champions, two covering the North of Kirklees and one covering the South. They work on a sessional basis to ensure flexibility to attend sessions and events.
Through this new approach we have:
- Created a separate, more efficient pathway for targeted families to access the Healthy Start Scheme.
- Our champions provide practical support such as enrolling families on to the scheme.
- Improved the accessibility of vitamins by supplying free maternal and child supplements to community partners and volunteers to distribute locally to targeted families, at settings where they are already attending.
- Improved our reach into BAME and marginalised communities, to increase uptake of Healthy Start and other health services by those families most in need.
- 2 of our champions are bilingual.
For more information about the Healthy Start Scheme please visit Get help to buy food and milk (Healthy Start)
To speak to Fresh Futures about our Community Champions please email [email protected] or call 01484 415465
