Michelle Barry, the team leader for child health promotion for Healthy Cities Illawarra, tells us about the Dinner Plate Project, which brings families together to cook, eat and socialise
What is the Dinner Table Project?
The Dinner Table Project is a six-week, family capacity-building program that will empower marginalised families in the Shellharbour LGA to spend more time together, preparing meals and at the dinner table, encouraging quality interactions over healthy home-cooked meals. Ultimately, this project aims to build stronger family units while improving individual health and wellbeing. This project is kindly supported by Barnardos Community for Children.
The program aims to address multiple barriers experienced by vulnerable families, through six ‘hands on’ sessions of two hours each. These will be co-delivered by Health Promotion Officers, qualified community nutritionists, youth/community development specialists etc. They are supported by volunteers from a range of health and wellbeing areas.
The sessions are comprised of 2 key building blocks:
- Building nutritional knowledge, basic food preparation and cooking skills
- Sharing a meal and communicating as a family
The sessions are complemented by an online Facebook group that extends learning from the program throughout the week and supports building healthy habits into the home. Initiatives such as the ‘dinner time selfie’ provide peer support and encouragement from within the group and learning from each other.
How do we aim to improve health outcomes?
Family meals are an important opportunity for developing strong parent-child relationships and family cohesion, providing children with a sense of stability and connectedness. Positive family atmosphere and conversation during regular meal times has been linked by research to fewer behavioural problems, and improved literacy.
Additionally, parental modelling of healthy eating and children regularly eating meals with their parents at the table are shown to increase the consumption of more fruits, vegetables and dairy products, and children are at a reduced risk of being overweight.
Some families are less likely to share positive and quality meal time together due to compounding barriers, including a lack of personal time, resources and facilities, education, poor access to healthy food options, less cooking skills and other social factors. Children who grow up in these families often experience higher levels of negative physical and psychological impacts and are more likely to experience behavioural problems, learning deficits, social isolation, poor nutritional intake, and other health and wellbeing inequalities.
The Illawarra experiences a level of socio-economic disadvantage higher than the state average and increasing food insecurity. The Dinner Table Project aims to enable vulnerable children to experience the benefits of heathy quality family mealtimes for increased health and wellbeing.
How do you find more information about the program?
If your family or a family you know would benefit from this program, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact linda@healthycities.org.au or call 02 4283 8111 to have a chat about enrolment.
We’re always looking for financial support and volunteers across all of our programs to promote the health and wellbeing of people of Illawarra. If you think this is something you’d like to pursue, please contact our office on 02 4283 8111 or email admin@healthycities.org.au
For more information on the Dinner Table Project, visit healthycities.org.au and follow @healthycitiesillawarra on social media