Foyer Health Champions

Foyer Health is an exciting three year programme to increase the skills, resources and opportunities that disadvantaged young people have to make a healthy transition to adulthood.

There are three themes to the programme: healthy eating, physical activity and mental well-being. Foyer Health is funded by the Big Lottery Fund’s Well-being programme and managed by the Foyer Federation.

Foyer Health has four key areas:
1. Young people will be supported to choose and achieve a health and well-being goal through one to one support from a member of staff that has been on a life coaching skills training programme.
2. Young people will have opportunities to experience a range of healthy living activities through taster sessions on healthy eating, physical activity and mental well-being.
3. Every Foyer will develop a specialist project on one of the following: healthy eating (Year One), physical activity (Year Two) or mental well-being (Year Three).
4. Foyer Health will also enable 120 Foyers in England to achieve specialist health accreditation standards that will ensure that every Foyer is a healthy place to live, work and learn.

The Health Champion
The Health Champion role is to lead and co-ordinate the Foyer Health programme in each Foyer.
Areas of responsibility include:

• Establishing and co-ordinating a Health Action Team that includes at least 2 young people, and may involve other staff, managers, board members and relevant outside agencies.
  Engaging and supporting young people to participate in planning, designing, delivering and evaluating the programme.
• The Health Action team will develop the planned activities for your Foyer Health programme in consultation with young people. Once ideas are developed for taster sessions and your healthy eating programme, the Health Champion along with the Health Action team puts these plans into action and evaluates the outcomes.
• The Health Champion will lead and co-ordinate each Foyer in working towards the Foyer Health Accreditation Standards (core health standards plus specialist healthy eating standards). This will require auditing your current provision, engaging young people in assessing the current service, taking any action needed to for the Foyer to meet the standards, and collecting evidence to demonstrate how the standard has been met. The healthy eating standards must be met by the end of year One (Nov 08) and the core health standards by the end of 2009.
• The Health Champion takes the lead in promoting the Foyer Health programme to young people and staff in the Foyer service and in partner agencies.
  They Health Champion creates new partnerships with external agencies to increase young people’s access to local health resources and/or develops existing partnership working.
  The Health Champion co-ordinates input from other Foyer staff, partner agencies, Foyer Federation Healthy Eating Ambassadors, and other sessional workers and may lead some of the planned activities
• Depending on how your Foyer chooses to manage the programme, the Health Champion may be responsible for collating the quarterly monitoring forms to be returned to the Foyer Federation to ensure continues funding.
• The Health Champion leads and co-ordinates the input of the Foyer into the evaluation of Foyer Health. This may involve collecting case studies, maintaining evidence of activities, getting feedback from young people.

Opportunities for Health Champions
Health Champions will have access to range of opportunities to support their role and for professional development through attending quarterly Foyer Health Network meetings/workshops, access to peer support and practice sharing with other Foyers, external specialist speakers and specialist input from Health Eating Ambassadors.