My role with the Partnership initially focused largely on Food Mapping and Procurement work found HERE; this aims to help improve connections between local food producers and buyers, increase access to healthy and local food, benefit the local economy and reduce food miles.
For the last year my role has covered the whole work of the Food Partnership as its Coordinator, all of which you can find out about on the ‘Our Projects’ section of our homepage. This is a role that I adore and hope to do far into the future.
I would love to hear from anyone interested in our work. My email is:
adamguy@hartlepoolcommunitytrust.org.uk
April 2026
The Hartlepool Food Partnership aims to help everyone across Hartlepool when it comes to healthy, affordable and sustainable food though, to be honest, quite a bit of our recent work has been focussed on children. This is in part as, at a young age, we can get into eating habits that last our lifetime. Encouraging children to learn and stick with healthier eating habits is therefore of huge importance not least due to the easy availability and mass-advertising of less healthy options
So, what has the food partnership been doing about this recently? Firstly, while it may seem like ages that I’ve been going on about the cartoon mascot competition, by the time this has landed into your inbox the nine winners, and the favourite of those nine which will be our mascot, will have just been decided. I can’t wait to find out the results! We do though need to let them all know privately first before, all being well, they will be announced in an upcoming issue of Hartlepool Life; I will share this news article in a bonus newsletter when I can.
We have done this competition to get primary school-aged children to think about healthy food, be creative and feel a sense of involvement with the Food Partnership. In total 11 primary schools and 2 home education groups have been involved, receiving over 600 entries with over 2000 children spoken to in assemblies about the Food Partnership and the competition. Hopefully, for at least a proportion of those children, it has got them thinking about healthy eating choices.
In addition, once you are reading this, we should have to hand several thousand copies of our Kids Corner magazine, one for every primary school-aged child across Hartlepool. These will be distributed as fast as we can though you can see it online on our Kid’s Corner page. This again has been a lot of work, being the work of the Food Partnership, the printing gratefully funded by Hartlepool Borough Council, and with critical contributions from Hartlepool-based Meg Turner (artwork), Andrea Butera (recipe and video ), Hartlepool Sport (Move Mania) and the Oral Health Promotion Department, Tees Community Dental Service.
The magazine itself is 20 pages full of fun activities, stories, competitions and more, all linked to healthy living/eating and good dental health. We hope that children greatly enjoy it, think about some of the messages conveyed inside and look forward to Issue 2 which is already in the works and will be released later this year.
Once the mascot competition is complete, we have a new healthy eating school activity ready to launch which is a play on words of the ‘six seven’ craze amongst young people, though I’ll tell you about that next month. Time to go and prepare for the cartoon mascot judging….
March 2026
As many of you will know, the mission of the Hartlepool Food Partnership is Healthy, Affordable and Sustainable Food for All in Hartlepool which is, we happily admit, a substantial aim to have, being achievable bit by bit overtime. Nothing makes us happier though than when we hear stories of actions being done to help achieve ‘bit by bit progress’ by people, businesses and organisations across the borough and I have a great recent example to share.
At a Hartlepool youth centre it was observed by the staff that at least half of the youths coming through the door were regularly bringing in a £4 food box from the nearby fish and chip shop. As we all know, an occasional takeaway is fine, but regular ones are less advisable. The youth centre acted, not by banning this from happening (as that often has the opposite effect with kids, it certain can do with my 10 year old!) but instead they now offer a (cheaper) £2 home-cooked healthy and nutritious meal, which is proving popular and ultimately reducing the number of youths getting takeaways. Isn’t that a good news story? It makes me wonder how it can be replicated elsewhere.
A recent focus for ‘bit by bit progress’ for the Food Partnership has been getting children thinking about healthy food, including in the sessions I now run for both primary schools and nurseries. Also, I am delighted to announce that we have received c.640 entries for the Cartoon Mascot competition, I was thinking 200 would be amazing and so I am thrilled! Judging will happen soon. With the eleven schools and 2 youth groups involved this time, nearly 3000 children will have heard about the Food Partnership and the competition, and hopefully many more in the news article and entry sheets very kindly published within Hartlepool Life and on our website. It’s all about, in this case, spreading our messages of healthy eating, and understanding where food comes, bit by bit.
A final thought for this month. A critical focus of Food Partnerships, though one I feel that can be easily crowded out by both Healthy and Affordable Food is Sustainable food: food production that feeds us but is also maintainable on our world, with no or minimised environmental impact. It was recently suggested to me that perhaps one further word should be added onto the end of our mission statement: Healthy, Affordable and Sustainable for all in Hartlepool Forever. What do you all think?
February 2026
This last month has flown by, in part as the Partnership has raced ahead with a few long-term projects nearing completion.
The Cartoon Mascot Competition has been all about getting children thinking about healthy food, being creative and feeling a sense of involvement with their local Food Partnership. The closing date for entries has now passed, with 11 schools being involved (entries from the last three of these will be picked up next week). There have also been online entries and many from home-educated groups, HAF groups and those sent to us from the entry pages very kindly printed in Hartlepool Life. I am absolutely delighted with the number of entries we’ve been receiving, including nearly 150 from St Aidan’s Primary School. The final total will be shared next month.
The next step will soon be the judging, with the final nine being published in Hartlepool Life for a Hartlepool-wide vote for the top winner. Yet the celebration of all this local creativity won’t stop there: we plan to have displays of entries in Community Hubs, all the entries will be shared on our website, schools will receive videos of all of their entries (I’m picturing the style of the ‘Gallery’ from Tony Hart shows) and we’re going to make ‘Snap’ cards from entries that children can print off from our website. Exciting times! And a very big thankyou again to the prizegivers for this competition: Hartlepool Life, Hartlepool United FC, Hartlepool Community Trust, Hartlepool Community Hubs and Play Out Hartlepool.
In addition, we are getting close to having a final draft of our Kids’ Corner magazine complete (which will link with our Kid’s Corner website), which will be available free to all primary-school aged children in the town, being full of stories, activities and much more, with an overall fun emphasis on healthy eating and living as well as good dental health. I am thrilled with how it is looking. We will be able to have copies of this for every primary school in Hartlepool (as well as home-educated children) though we need further increase awareness within schools. Please let me know if you feel you could help with this.
Other recent work has included helping local organisations looking to develop cookery lessons (see ‘Website Highlight’ below) and I’m very pleased to say we are working with the amazing local cook Booteracooks to now have a delicious weekly recipe published in Hartlepool Life – have you tried any of them yet?
We have also got a brand new brilliant Low and No Cost Food provider to shout about: Hornby Park, offering a warm hub and soup and roll for just £1 Tuesday-Thursday and a £4 Chef’s Special meal every Friday (each session being 11am-2pm) – this is particularly important for Seaton Carew where there are otherwise few options of this nature available.
January 2026
After the dawn of the recent new year (though I have no idea how it is already nearly February!), following the busyness of the year-end and then festive celebrations, it is a good time to reflect and make plan in amongst the busyness of everything else.
I am in the process of collating and writing up an updatable record of all the various projects that the Food Partnership is doing, both large and small, as well as some exciting plans for future projects if all goes to plan. It is fascinating to see it all be written up in this way, I look forward to sharing it when it is completed.
Despite this ongoing opportunity of reflection, it has been a very hectic, yet enjoyable few weeks back since Christmas (which has delayed the completion of the reflection!). There has been work linked to the former Hartlepool Food Network (see the Hartlepool Food Star section below) and the Design a Cartoon Mascot competition (see the Website Highlight section below) has gone from ticking over to taking up a good proportion of my time since it finally launched, with the closing date being the 23rd of February (please get your 5-11 year-olds to enter!).
In addition, I can now reveal some very exciting secret projects we have recently been working on. Alongside colleagues at Public Health, the Food Partnership is working on two 20-page issues of a magazine we’ve called ‘Kids’ Corner’ which we’d love to give to every primary school-aged child in the Borough of Hartlepool. These will be full of stories, games, fun information and more, all connected to healthy eating/living and good dental health, and we can’t wait to show you them once they’re ready. In addition, some of you may have heard of the amazing Scran recipe book created by Youth Voice Hartlepool nearly two years ago. With their amazing help we have created a bespoke edition of the book, in celebration of the Food Mascot competition, with the aim of helping encourage young ones to practice cooking alongside their grown-ups. We plan to, again, soon give a copy to every Hartlepool primary school-aged child. I will share more details on these next month.
Once these are all ready for release however, we need direct contact with a relevant member of staff at each school to arrange sharing these releases with all children; this isn’t easy to attain at all schools. If you can help with this, please do email us at info@hartlepoolfoodpartnership.co.uk as we don’t want any children to miss out.
November 2025
As much as some can’t quite believe it, Christmas is coming, though the work of the Hartlepool Food Partnership carries on. As usual it’s been a month where some jobs were completed as expected, others faster than expected and others… the opposite. This is surely quite normal when you’re working on a number of projects, some of which can take time to finally complete or start bearing fruit. Though I have a few exciting updates to share of some work projects that have been ticking over for a while.
Firstly, as some of you may know, the newest version of the Low and No Cost Food leaflet (and posters) has been completed. Every revised version is a surprising amount of work but very rewarding as we know how useful this is to many people. The new version can be found HERE. While it’s only 7ish months since the last version, there are several changes including two new entries. If you know of people who could benefit from this, please do let them know.
During a meeting with Healthwatch Hartlepool a while back, plans were made for the Partnership to make a food themed Memory Box, to complement other themed memory boxes which can be accessed from the Community Hubs. This is now ready for distribution. Items within it include vintage food tins and boxes, cookery books, aprons, coseys, magazine adverts and more.
It has taken longer to officially launch the Design a Cartoon Mascot competition for the Partnership than I would have liked, though it is officially starting this month, the closing date likely being the end of January. I strongly hope lots of primary school-aged children will have a go at getting creative as they design a healthy eating-themed cartoon mascot. The appropriate webpage, with everything you need to know on, and printable entry forms, can be found on out website; entry forms will soon be published in Hartlepool Life also. For those looking to help with this, if you have any strong links to primary schools, please let them know about this or, if possible, let me know their email address so I can send them everything they need to know to maximise awareness of this.
Last week I did my first fun session for very well-behaved nursery kids at Aldersyde Day Nursery, where I read a fruit-themed book with lots of interactive props, talked about favourite fruit and veg and did some fruit tastings. Further sessions are booked in at Kiddikins and West View School Nursery before Christmas, and I have 5-11 year-old children activity sessions booked in again from January. If you know of anywhere who may be interested in these (free!) sessions, please me know.
This has been a selection of the work the Partnership is currently doing; I’ll see what else I can tell you about in the next newsletter…
October 2025
Before I started this role, 17 months ago, I had been a full time father to my young children for the previous 4 years, a role I adored. I now balance that role alongside being the Hartlepool Food Partnership’s Coordinator three days a week, a role I equally love. Naturally I now find that the house isn’t quite as tidy as it was (which is particularly hard to maintain when you have young kids!) and, more importantly to this update, I don’t have as much time to plan meals and cook, leading to quicker and simpler options sometimes.
This is a common issue; people want to cook well for themselves and friends and/or family, but they lack time, which can lead to increased use of less healthy ready meals, processed meat/fish products and fast food restaurant visits. This can also lack confidence when it comes to cookery, which is very common. A recent YouGov poll showed that 18% of people could cook just 0-3 meals without looking at a recipe, with 31% being able to cook just 4-9 meals (totalling nearly 50%). In terms of how often people learn to cook a new recipe, people from Northern England do this less regularly than the UK average.
To help with this, the Food Partnership has a Healthy, Affordable and Easy Recipes and Cookery Help page, full of delicious recipes (including accompanying videos in most cases) from the former Hartlepool Food Network. It also contains links to the brilliant Scran cookbook (a recipe book made by Youth Voice Hartlepool for Hartlepool kids), brilliant CBeebies cookery shows and the Council’s Carry on Cooking course. In addition, on the Kid’s Corner children can get a certificate if they have cooked or tried something new. Please visit these webpages and let us know what you think.
In addition, I have recently visited and catalogued several community kitchens across the town. This was in order to identify where community cookery courses could be run, being arranged either by ourselves or the Council. I currently having ten viable locations, spread across much of Hartlepool, and a handful of potential chefs. Hopefully in due course this will lead to opportunities for people to learn easy, good value and tasty cookery ideas. I hope to share more news on this soon.
Other jobs this last month have included several reports/presentations. Sometimes it can feel that you’re talking/writing about your work more than actually doing it, though these have the added benefit of reminding yourself what you have achieved. Much of what I achieve in this job are little bits here and there, and taking this step back helps make me realise how much they add up together, providing positive outcomes for Hartlepool. I recommend everyone do this every so often, be it with their work or life in general; it makes you realise what you are achieving, and can help you work out what you can, and what you want to, achieve next.
September 2025
Signs of autumn are here: the calendar date, Strictly being back on tv and, most noticeably to me, the changing weather. It is getting cooler (and wetter at last) and it seems the first hints of overnight frost aren’t too far away. For those of us growing food plants in our garden, this can limit or stop further produce growing, but there are advantages too. Weeds largely slow or stop growing too, though I admit I find weeding rather therapeutic, and my two young daughters love taking them from me and putting them into the weed bin. Also, if you grow parsnips (a favourite of mine), exposure to frosts sweeten their flavour.
As the nights and temperatures draw in, some people’s food choices adapt to this, potentially desiring, instead of salads, more hearty stews, with one stew recipe being included later on in this newsletter and there are more amongst these recipe pages. I personally still enjoy both salads and stews all year round, as I believe do many others.
The Hartlepool Food Partnership similarly, all year round, tries to encourage and aid everyone having access to healthy, nutritious, affordable and sustainable (including locally produced) food. Someone was asking me the other day, does this mean you discourage all unhealthy eating? The simply answer is, of course not, everyone (myself included) likes treats of some sort, be it an occasional pie, cake or something else. This is why the online compendium of local food producers (for which the recent substantial update is now largely complete) includes sections for items such as those. Buying them from a more local producer, where possible, is brilliant, but the trick is the balance of that with other food types.
This was relevant to a brilliant and very well-attended Workshop I was at last week at the Belle Vue Centre (and which I highlighted in last month’s newsletter). The workshop brainstormed how to aid young child health, in particular minimising the degree of overweight/obesity in 0-5 year olds, hopefully helping to establish life-long healthier eating habits.
Treats are allowed, but it’s the amount people eat, and the balance with the rest of their diets, which is important. Similarly, we all indulge sometimes, many of us in the festive season, which my kids daily remind me is now less than 100 days away (!!). Again, it’s all about the balance and just doing what you can when faced with the temptations of foods ranging from very healthy to the opposite.
August 2025
People try to eat healthily but it is not easy. People can lack adequate time or confidence when cooking, eating healthily costs around twice as much as eating a less healthy diet and ultra-high processed foods seem to be increasingly hard to avoid. This can affect everyone, both older and younger.
One of the many aims of the Hartlepool Food Partnership is aiding development of healthy diets of very young children. This will then hopefully establish into life-long healthy eating habits. This is particularly important here since children starting school (at reception) in Hartlepool have the highest rates of obesity in England, and these values can be difficult to lessen as children age.
For those of you interested in this critical issue for the town, we hope you may be interested in an upcoming workshop: Healthy Starts in Hartlepool: Building child health from pre-pregnancy to 5 years together (nutrition and physical activity focus). This is being held at the Belle Vue Centre, 10am-2pm on Thursday the 18th of September, with lunch being provided. There is more information about this below, which we hope is of interest.
My work this month has included trialling an activity session based on healthy eating and where food comes from for a HAF group. Thankfully it was a great success and included physical and PowerPoint games and making a ‘big Art Attack’ (certain ones of you will get the reference) of a wheat field and the layers of soil, including roots and (fake) worms – lots of fun! I hope to do much more of this for young ones as we move into autumn.
Further tasks this month have included finalising the cartoon mascot competition plans (more about this next month) and a huge review of the c.450 local food producers I’ve collated on our website’s Local Food Procurement Maps. Hopefully by the time you’ve seen this a significant update will be nearly complete, including new producers and updated maps. I hope it is of great help to you in locating more locally produced food.
Finally, the question I set last month (see the pictures in the July update below). The black seeds are from oilseed rape, and from them we get rapeseed oil used in cooking. The second plant is Sugar Beet, from which we get UK-grown sugar.
July 2025
A few days before the end of the school year I visited Greatham Primary School and did several activities, with all of the very well-behaved year groups there (from 3-11 years of age), based around healthy eating and where food comes from.
The day was a great success, with the children tasting fruit and veg samples that, in some cases, they hadn’t tried before. They also answered fun questions on identifying farm animals, how different foods are good for you and what foods you get from different plants you see in fields. Further activities included using large cloths to show the different layers of soil, making root patterns and working out which plants grow under or above the soil, and handling models of wheat plants, fat, muscle and worms. I hope to do this at many more schools and further youth groups over the next several months, if you’re interested please get in touch at info@hartlepoolfoodpartnership.co.uk.
At the school I had the classes of 7-9 and 9-11 year olds write down their top three fruits and vegetables with, interestingly, both groups having the same favourites, these being strawberries, grapes, apple and melon, and carrots, broccoli and cucumber. I wonder how that would compare for adults?
As mentioned last month, plans are afoot for a town-wide competition to design a mascot for the Hartlepool Food Partnership, which will launch in the new school year in September and which I hope will be very popular. More details will be forthcoming soon. I will also soon be sharing a report I’ve written, all about Hartlepool’s Food System, sharing gathered research about the town and region’s food-related health, food buying behaviour, local food production and more. It has been a pleasure to write and hopefully of great interest to many of you.
To finish, at Greatham School, one harder question I asked the older kids was, for these two products grown by farmers, what food do we get from them? I wonder how many of you know? I will let you all know the answers next month.
June 2025
Food is critical to everyone’s lives, of all ages, and so the Hartlepool Food Partnership seeks to help everyone in the town. When I glance through all the Projects we are working on, it is fascinating to see how virtually all of them are for the benefit of children as well as adults.
There is so much that can be done for children when it comes to Hartlepool’s food environment. From the earliest exposure to solid food at weaning, and through the rest of childhood, children can pick up food habits that they may stick with for the rest of their lives. Being a parent of three young kids myself, I understand the challenges that those looking after children face when the desire to feed them healthily combines with the need for food they’ll accept (and therefore won’t go to waste), is affordable and is easy/quickly enough to make balanced with everything else you have to do.
We want to help where we can including helping establish Food Growing Projects in Schools, and hosting maps of local Breastfeeding Welcome Venues and everywhere where you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables. We also have brilliant Recipes Videos (from the former Hartlepool Food Network) and, most recently, a brand new Kid’s Corner.
I am particularly excited about the Kid’s Corner, though I’m surprised to say that no other Food Partnership seems to have a section just for the young, despite how critical our work is for them. While this area is still at an early stage, and there is much more to be added in the coming months, please visit this section, spread the news of it and please let us know what you think or the current activity sheets and certificate opportunities.
Plans are afoot to have a town-wide competition to design a Hartlepool Food Partnership fruit/vegetable cartoon mascot for the Kid’s Corner and related activities, I look forward to hopefully sharing more about this next month.
May 2025
The Hartlepool Food Partnership is all about Hartlepool and all about Food but also, as importantly, all about Partnership. We can only be effective by working in Partnership with the wider community in the town, with those that care about the quality, affordability and sustainability of food in Hartlepool. This includes representatives from the community, food businesses, the voluntary sector, educational institutions and the local authority.
Everyone is welcome to be involved, for example sharing their views and input at our Steering Group meetings, held every two months. We would love you to come along to our next meeting and you’re welcome to contact me anytime at adamguy@hartlepoolcommunitytrust.org.uk.
One of our major aims is helping schools create and maintain food growing areas, where pupils can learn about growing healthy fruit and veg and, hopefully, be willing to try that which they grow. We cannot do this our own but have, this month, been working in Partnership with St Aidan’s Primary School, the Hartlepool College of Further Education and Play Out Hartlepool on the development of raised beds at the school. I have also recently visited both Kiddikins Nursery and Aldersyde Nursery to see how the Food Partnership can help with their brilliant arrays of raised beds and I am in the early stage of helping West View Primary School with a growing project. In Partnership with others, we can do so much more for the people of Hartlepool.
April 2025
The Hartlepool Food Partnership’s aim, in a nutshell, is ‘Healthy, affordable and sustainable food for all in Hartlepool. We have had a big focus on ‘affordable’ this month with the completion and launch of the significantly revamped Low and No Cost Food Leaflet for the town (find it HERE).
Some of you may ask, what is the Low and No Cost Food Leaflet? It is a guide to all of the amazing Hartlepool organisations that offer either low or no cost food bags, shops/pantries, hot meals and more to those in need. These services are of critical importance to so many of us at some point(s) in our lives, often when we least expect it. These leaflets are something you can keep in your house, giving the information that you need, when you need it. Paper copies can be found in the town’s Hubs and Libraries, and they will be available in further places soon, and it is always available online.
Aside from this, other recent responsibilities have included the design of a revamped flyer explaining the work we are doing, further new website content explaining our community growing and growing projects with schools and nurseries and visits to local nurseries.
March 2025
This month has been very enjoyable though a busy one as we move into spring and the clocks go forward. In any organisation you are sometimes the swan swimming gracefully on a pond though, while you may hopefully look graceful, you sometimes are actually it’s legs swimming like crazy, keeping on top of everything. This month has been a bit of both.
We have co-ordinated deliveries of over 600 tree saplings to local primary schools and are arranging led planting sessions, and we look forward to seeing the growth of the trees alongside the schools’ pupils. Any organisation needs to write regular reports and that too has been completed this month for one of our funders, covering the last 15 months of the Food Partnership; a version of this will soon be shared on our website.
The online local food compendium is currently having a large update, which many new producers being added; please continue to make use of it and let others know about it. We are designing logbooks for the town’s Seed Libraries, which will allow us to better monitor their use. We have also nearly finished a considerable re-design and content of the town’s Low and No Cost Food Leaflet.