Oasis is committed to helping families work their way out of poverty. Our aim is to halt and reverse the intergenerational cycle we see day in, day out.
The biggest contributing factor for many families we work with is dealing with 'holiday hunger'. Many parents simply cannot afford the extra food school holidays necessarily mean.
Children that would usually receive one warm and nourishing meal at school, go without during school holidays as parents struggle to find the extra money needed to fill a hungry tummy. The impact of this is huge. Quite apart from the pain of being constantly hungry, children find it harder to be warm, and are more likely to become ill as their immune system struggles to cope. Not eating enough food has a knock on effect which lasts far beyond the school holidays as they find it hard to concentrate and their ability to learn is affected.
Oasis works to remove this food deprivation by ensuring every child and young person is provided with breakfast, lunch and dinner during term time and at least two meals during school holidays.
In this way, young people are free to focus on personal development and life-skills - also provided by Oasis.
In support of our aims, the community support team run inclusive and varied holiday activity programmes to serve young people from Oasis Academies and local communities. As well as providing food, their roles are to offer targeted advice and support for those same young people and their families where ever necessary.
An extension of the holiday programme is the 'Lunchbox' which ensures that not only do young people have a healthy balanced meal throughout the holidays, but they also learn vital cooking skills.
Because we realise not everyone has the means or ability to travel to the community location everyday, the Lunchbox is a mobile provision, taking food directly into the community where it can feed local children and facilitate sports and craft activities.
