'Best Club Ever!': Your Holiday Hub Summer Fun at RCG

Where can you visit the beach, party at a festival, build a new town and toast marshmallows, all without leaving Knowle? Our YHH holiday club!

For two weeks in July and August, we ran a summer holiday club for an incredible group of eight to 16-year-olds. These Your Holiday Hub (YHH) sessions were funded by the Department for Education’s Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) Programme, and were designed for children in receipt of free school meals and/or those with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities.

We partnered with two fantastic local food organisations — Square Food Foundation and The Outdoor Cooking Club — to cook and eat a delicious hot meal together each day. The menus included curries, kebabs, jacket potatoes, noodles and BBQ; all served with plenty of Garden-grown veg and salad. But the overwhelming favourite of the fortnight? The homemade pizzas, fired up in our outdoor pizza oven!

67% of the parents we surveyed agreed that attending the holiday club had increased their child’s awareness or understanding of healthy eating, with one commenting that their child ‘now has a passion for cooking’.

So much fun!

Each day was themed and packed with creative activities based around the needs, interests and skills of our attendees, and they blew us away with their creativity, enthusiasm and bravery! We did everything from basketball to bracelet making, paper flowers to picking veg, tote bag decorating to toasting marshmallows, theatre to football, plus a lot more in between! One of our attendees really appreciated the child-led format, saying ‘it’s so good. [the staff] let us do what we want to do and it’s really calm. They come and talk to us and they really listen.’

We had some wonderful feedback from parents of the attendees, including:

Thank you for providing this opportunity for children and young people with SEND. It’s very difficult to find inclusive and appropriate holiday time activities that are accessible to all.

My child thoroughly loved the holiday club. The staff were fantastic, and the social element was really beneficial.

The team at Redcatch Community Garden have changed my child's life for the better. They love attending, even when it has proved challenging for them, and they are always welcomed and supported at every visit.

At the end of the fortnight, one child told us, ‘I’m so sad it’s over. Best club ever!’ Couldn’t have put it better ourselves! We’re so grateful to our brilliant partners and of course to the incredible young people who filled each day with energy, creativity and fun. Bring on next Summer!