School Holiday Lunch Clubs for all the family

For the families of children who receive free school lunches, the school holidays can be a difficult time when it comes to providing all the necessary meals. Mothers’ Union members are working to bridge the gap for these families by supplying nutritious lunchtime meals for the children and their parents. 

Members do this by partnering with schools to identify those who are eligible for free school lunches and to advertise the service to these families. They can then sign up at school to attend the lunch clubs that are run from local church or community centre halls. 

The volunteers not only provide delicious, healthy meals. They acknowledge that it can also be very costly to keep the kids entertained during the school holidays, as well as challenging to think of different, stimulating things to do every day! Therefore, they put on craft activities and various fun games to make the club an exciting thing to attend for the children, in addition to being a real help to the parents (who also get fed too!). 

Peterborough diocese provides food boxes to eligible families in the Christmas holidays as they have found that during this time lots of families are busy doing other things and may not be able to attend the club but are still in need of the support. These are even hand delivered to the recipients homes! 

The Diocese of Bath & Wells put on a Toddler Lunch every Tuesday all year round and during the school holidays siblings can attend. 

As well as this, members from Coventry diocese volunteer at various school holiday lunch kitchens in Warwick and members in the Dicoese of St Asaph provide packed lunches for children in the school holidays.

These varying types of food provision are more inspiring examples of how our wonderful members are quietly working to serve their local communities with services that are really needed. If you know someone who could benefit from attending one of these clubs please share this article or urge them to get in touch with their local Mothers’ Union branch.

Mothers’ Union works in partnership with Make Lunch, Foodbank, The Salvation Army and Home Start, as well as other organisations to make these clubs possible.

(Image: i-stock.com/monkeybusiness)