Talking Early Years with June O'Sullivan
An inspiring, outspoken speaker, author, podcaster and regular media commentator, June O'Sullivan OBE is Chief Executive of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), one of London’s largest and most successful charitable social enterprises, operating 40+ award-winning nurseries in some of London’s most disadvantaged areas. Her monthly ‘real talk’ and no-holds-barred podcasts dive into the questions, topics and debates on all things Early Years, Parenting and Social Business – plus much, much more.
Talking Early Years with June O'Sullivan
Talking Early Years: What have Food Banks got to do with the Early Years?
As an organisation, we have always been involved with issues of poverty and it was interesting to find that back in 1926 we were involved with the National Cookery School of Cookery which is a slightly different twist to what we are doing now. Our organisation then was known as the City of Westminster Society of Health and was helping parents to learn how to cook to support their children’s health. Children were dying from malnutrition because they had too little to eat whilst today, children from poorer families are suffering from obesity resulting from a diet of poor-quality food high in fat, sugar and salt.
Early Years is a highly political space where powerful issues of finance, education, employment, health, housing, and care all collide and we have to navigate through this with children’s futures central to the debate.
Today, we are helping by training our chefs as part of the LEYF Early Years Chef Academy, running food banks and partnering with food pantries and food distribution organisations such as City Harvest.
In this podcast, I am talking to two inspirational LEYF managers who have each gone that extra mile in the name of helping to tackle food poverty and supporting their local community.