School’s our for summer, and Holiday Club at Manchester Youth Zone is well underway! It’s been a hectic few weeks with dozens of young people running around, playing games and getting to know each other – but it’s been a lot of fun!
The main reason UKFast and the Department for Education funded the Holiday Club was to tackle ‘Holiday Hunger’, where many families in Greater Manchester struggle to provide their children with healthy, nutritious meals that the young people would normally receive, free of charge, at school – recent studies have shown that some children may lose up to half a stone over the summer holidays.
At our Holiday Club, we provide young people with breakfast and ‘proper home cooked’ meals at lunchtime in our cafe. Head Chef Nina has been cooking up some classics like meat & potato pie, chicken curry, and fish & chips – McDonald’s can’t compete!
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Having access to 2 nutritious meals during the day means the young people have plenty of energy to burn off before they go home. Our Holiday Club Youth Workers and Volunteers have planned a whole host of sports and activities to give them a chance to cut loose.
When the weather was nice (sun, please come back!) at the start of summer, our young people got involved with classic playground games like football and British Bulldog on our 3G pitch. Indoors, they get to have a go at the climbing wall, obstacle courses, free running and even ‘Crystal Maze’ style competitions.
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Once a week, some of our young people also go on trips across the the city. Last week was a trip to the National Football Museum (we had even taken over their Twitter for a few hours), where they learned about the history of the beautiful game. They learned about some of the sport’s historic moments and greatest players, like the Busby Babes, the Munich Air Disaster, Bert Trautmann’s performance at the 1956 FA Cup Final, and – of course – England winning the World Cup in 1966 (football’s coming home… one day…)
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Once again, we’d like to thank UKFast and the Department for Education for funding this project. Check out some of the feedback we’ve had from our young people below:
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