Pod Bites: The youth view

Laiba, Dev and Jani are just some of the Young Food Ambassadors for the Food Foundation who report from the front line of food insecurity and campaign for the right to food for every child in the UK. The Sheila McKechnie (SMK) Foundation awarded the YFAs second place in the ‘Young Campaigner Award’ category for our Feed the Future campaign. It recognises how much they have achieved during the campaign, which calls on the Government to extend school meals eligibility in response to evidence that 800,000 children living in poverty in England don’t get a Free School Meal. 

The Young Food Ambassadors helped to plan our ‘Superpowers of Free School Meals’ event in Westminster for MPs, performing a spoken word piece to an audience of over 200 people. They also worked with The Food Foundation to design a social media campaign and wrote to their MPs. This campaign contributed to London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s commitment to extend Free School Meals to an additional 270,000 children for one year from September 2023 in London. While the campaign continues as so many children in poverty are still miss out on Free School Meals, we're grateful to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation for recognising the Young Food Ambassadors hard work and all they have achieved so far.

Here Laiba, Dev and Jani look back on the year, remembering the residential where they planned the Feed the Future campaign and Laiba's lunch with Holly Lynch MP.

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