Lotto money used to promote healthy living

One of the hot topics at the moment is healthy eating and child obesity, with even the government getting involved to tackle the problem. In Devonport, a community centre in Granby Island has benefitted from Lottery funding in order to help it promote healthy eating for children in the area.

The community centre has received £145,000 in Lotto funding to set up courses to promote sports activities and on how to grow and cook your own vegetables. Sam Swabey, the executive director of the community centre, hopes that the Lotto funding will help them to persuade children that they shouldn’t be afraid of vegetables.

In addition to promoting healthy living and healthy eating, the Lottery funded classes will also promote reading, writing and arithmetic in order to help families with their education.

Sam Swabey said about the Lottery funding:

I'm absolutely delighted. The idea now is to get children and parents involved in the process.

The Lottery grant is part of the Lottery Fund's Family Learning programme, which has been set up to aid families and parents to help their children’s education at home.

It will start off with sports training, then we'll move on to nutritional stuff like planning a healthy lunch and teaching them what professional athletes eat on a daily basis.

A lot of children are scared of vegetables, so the sport gets them in but we'll also have some cookery, too. The next stage is to get these people growing some fresh veg or fruit in their own homes. You can grow tomatoes easily, for example.

And the final thing from that is education. We need to educate the parents as well – not for them, but so they pass it on to the children. So it's across the board really.

In the family learning programme, the National Lottery is giving away £40 million for applicants to seek grants between £10,000 and £500,000.