Building community partnerships with healthy kai

The Hauraki Cultural (Kapa Haka) Festival in Paeroa was an ideal launching pad for healthy eating messages, with Te Korowai Hauora O Hauraki giving away fruit kebabs to more than 300 festival participants and whānau.

Te Korowai Hauora O Hauraki’s long-term vision is that they are able to assist the local Hauraki marae to develop and implement their own healthy food policies. Iwi Health Promoter Gwendol Welburn says the promotion was a small step in developing relationships with key stakeholders and iwi.

The Hauraki Kapa Haka project, which included Waikato District Health Board involvement, promoted Feeding our Futures messages and aimed to ‘seed’ the idea of a no-dig gardening initiative.

Gwendol says providing delicious, free, healthy kai was a huge success in promoting several of the Feeding our Futures messages – in particular snacks don’t have to come in packets. Fruit was cut into bite-sized pieces and placed into large plastic containers, which people accessed with tongs. Congestion was avoided by providing greaseproof paper so people could load up with fruit and move away from the fruit containers to make their kebabs.

“Siblings were helping each other, parents were helping children and many grandparents were also enjoying the fruit. The kebabs were extremely popular with young and old and Manaia Marae, the organising committee for the 2008 festival, has already invited the group to repeat this promotion.”

Gwendol says $200 a day was spent on fruit for the two-day event at the Ngahutoitoi Marae, but demand was huge and the quantity of fruit could easily have been doubled and they would still have run out.

“In some cases children were discarding candyfloss and sugary drinks near our stall in favour of the fruit we offered.”

More than 180 people also answered Feeding our Futures healthy eating questions to enter a draw to win two popcorn makers. Gwendol says there was very high awareness of the Feeding our Futures messages among the mainly Māori audience.

Gwendol says the free fruit and Feeding our Futures messages meant promotion of the marae no-dig garden did get somewhat lost, but the event was successful in ‘planting’ the idea. Contacts were made to progress the gardening initiative.

Key learnings:

• Keep it simple. Avoid mixing messages and trying to do too much!
• There was excellent uptake and recall of the national Feeding our Futures campaign.
• Fruit kebabs were a popular choice among the young and old.
• Future promotions would include the planning of ‘sound bites’ and specific instructions for the MC.