Healthy High Streets: Making healthy eating easier for children and families
Challenge Prize | Community Engagement | Co-design | Prototyping
With Innovation Unit, Healthy London Partnership, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, Battersea Power Station Foundation with Hyde Housing, Public Health England, Haringey Council, Lambeth Council, Southwark Council
Role Senior Service Designer - project leading in Lambeth, research, facilitation, content and visual design, engagement across sites
2018
Our health is influenced by the places we grow up - homes, schools and streets - every day. How can we make healthier food the easier choice for children and young people on the high street?
The Healthy High Streets programme aimed to find and test solutions to improve the high street food environment by working with people who trade on and use high streets in London through a hyper-local challenge prize.
We specifically aimed to learn about local business motivations and potential ways to be part of solutions, local perceptions of the challenge, and new practical solutions to tackle childhood obesity on our high street.
Journey
Engaging local businesses and the community:
We used a range of approaches to engage local businesses, groups and residents, with the dual aim of gathering insights about experiences of both running businesses and making food choices on the high street and spreading the word about the challenge. The approaches include:
Visiting high street shops to build relationships with business owners and staff
Setting up pop-up street stalls to connect with the residents
Facilitating group conversations with children and young people in community events
Working closely with local connectors
Running a social media campaign to engage and promote the challenge
Supporting people to generate and submit ideas:
We helped people develop ideas through ideas events and 1:1 sessions. Businesses needed a lot of encouragement and practical support, such as help with recognising they might have an idea, language support and filling in the form.
Developing and testing ideas and evaluating:
People who won the prize were given up to £2,000 to develop and try out their ideas for nine weeks. We offered various support, including testing elements of ideas, graphic design, promotion and nutritional advice.
In Lambeth, we focused on youth-led customer engagement with businesses. Children and young people were involved in developing a tasty, healthy, and attractive menu at a local cafe, engaging other food businesses to offer healthier food menus and promoting the menus on social media and their peers' networks.
Outcome & Impact
We supported local businesses, community groups and the residents in three London high streets through ideation workshops and prototypes. We evaluated the early-stage prototypes and reflected on what works and doesn’t and the potential. We gathered insights and opportunities from our engagement work and the ideas we helped to test.
We also learnt that bringing young people into engaging business was a possible solution in and of itself. It has something that could help young people learn about healthy food choices for those who take part, and young people themselves play an important role in developing and spreading solutions.
See below for our project journey and report that highlights learnings in detail.
“One of the kids laughed at those wraps when we did the food sampling event. I convinced her to try it first, and she liked it. It’s always important to promote healthy options and letting them know about it.”
David Ogwe
27/01/1966 - 03/01/2021
I was fortunate to meet David through this project in Lambeth. He sincerely believed in children and young people and engaged them wholeheartedly. I will never forget his ethos when working with children and young people. He was a special human. And I loved working with him. Thank you, David. Rest in peace.