We're jumping on the end of year round-up bandwagon to reflect on some of our wins of 2024. It's been a big year and a lot has been going on behind the scenes. Read on for some of our milestones this year - including an incredibly exciting opportunity you might like to apply for!

It’s been an incredible year for The Body Happy Organisation and we’re going into 2025 feeling positive and hopeful for the future, both for the growth of our impact as an organisation and for the children and young people we serve.

Here are some of our highlights from 2024. Thank you for helping us get this far. We couldn’t do this without your support.

We completed our first ever academic pilot study

*Out of shot, Dr Kamila Irvine on one of the many zoom calls we’ve had this year!*

There were lots of learnings from this project which has strengthened our offering and helped inform the Theory of Change we’ve developed for our whole school programme that will be our main focus for 2025.

While we’re not a research organisation we deal with real world delivery and are keen to partner on research that contributes to our social impact and helps tackle the root causes of poor body image in children & young people. We’re proud of our relationship with The University of Lincoln and excited for our next phase of work ahead!

We joined Puffin’s first ever non-fiction showcase

*Pictured is our founder and Executive Director Molly Forbes alongside other brilliant non-fiction authors for this publishing event in Manchester.*

Publication of Every Body, for readers age 9+, has helped to put the body respect conversation firmly on the agenda in the world of publishing and children’s non-fiction. This event was pre-publication and helped amplify our work to libraries, booksellers and booksellers working in the education sector.

We developed and piloted a Food Positive Healthy Eating Scheme of Work

*Evidence of teaching shared by one of the schools who piloted the resources*

This project was led by Masters student Jennifer Nash who did a placement with us as part of her Masters degree in nutrition. This was a resource we’d wanted to create for a while, but hadn’t had the team capacity to prioritise. It was piloted in two schools and the kids loved the lessons!

Find out more about the rationale for this project here, including what the evidence shows us children should be learning about healthy eating if it’s done through a lens of body image promotion, eating disorder prevention and weight stigma reduction.

The way we talk about food and the way children learn about healthy eating, can really impact their relationship with food and their bodies, as well as the beliefs they hold about the bodies of others. This is a joyful, positive and impactful resource currently available in our Teaching Hub. When our whole school programme launches it will form part of the educational resource offering for primary schools.

Check out the resources currently available in our teaching hub

We delivered workshops to more than 2,000 children and young people.

*Some of our Body Happy Student Sessions in action this year*

We’ve directly delivered sessions to more than 2,000 children and young people around the UK this year. 87% of kids we surveyed told us they understand how to look after their body image now, an increase of 50% before the workshops.

Our Student Sessions will form an important aspect of our whole school programme when it launches. We’re still taking bookings for individual workshops for the rest of this academic year, but this is likely to change once our whole school programme rolls out.

Book for 2024-25 academic year

Every Body was published - and won Highly Commended in the Teach Primary Awards!

*It’s been brilliant to see it on the shelves of bookshops, libraries and schools around the UK!*

Last month the book was announced as one of the Highly Commended winners in the Teach Primary Awards, a brilliant way to round-off the book’s impact this year. This is just the beginning! We’re so grateful to the team at Puffin who recognised the vision of Every Body and have helped it reach so many children and young people so far.

We expanded our team and now have 31 facilitators in our network

*Some non-professionally taken shots of some of the team in action!*

All of our team of facilitators is trained with us to deliver our unique programme of workshops, and carry Enhanced DBS checks and have done Prevent safeguarding training. Every facilitator has experience working with children and young people, and comes from a professional background aligned with our work. We’ve got teachers in our team, a GP, a body image researcher, a children’s eating disorders dietitian, a health psychologist and educational mental health practitioners - to name just a few!

We also welcomed Non-Executive Director Sarah Goulden to our Board of Directors. Sarah’s support has been instrumental in helping to shape our business model as we develop our whole school programme and pursue financial sustainability and growth.

meet our team

We won the Fair Education Alliance Innovation Award

*Our founder and Executive Director Molly Forbes, with the other amazing award winners who she’ll be working alongside on the FEA Incubator Programme this year*

We were one of six winners out of 87 applicants for this prestigious award which comes with a £25k grant, training and support and Bloomberg 1:1 mentorship. This award gives us vital resources and support to develop, test and scale the Body Happy Schools Programme.

It also means we can make our Executive Director role a salaried one, giving us the foundations to grow our core operational team further for future sustainability. We know that having a properly resourced team is fundamental to successful impact, so this is a really big deal.

We started the pilot of our Body Happy Heroes programme

*Meet the UK’s first Body Happy Heroes - the brilliant year 5’s and 6’s who are piloting the programme in their school this year*

This is a pupil peer advocacy programme which will form one element of our whole school programme. Change is most effective when it comes from within, and we know that the Body Happy Heroes we work with to mentor as young change makers in their settings will be a pivotal part of our whole school programme when it launches.

We’re so grateful to the support we’ve had from independent swimwear brand Deakin & Blue for donating to supporting us on the early stages of this programme development.

We’re currently pursuing a fundraising target of £50,000 to enable us to develop and scale up a digital version of The Body Happy Schools programme. Click the link below to donate - and if you’re interested in a corporate partnership to support us then get in touch at hello@bodyhappyorg.com

Learn more

We secured funding with The University of Lincoln for a fully funded PhD studentship

Want to do a fully funded PhD on the Body Happy Schools programme with The Body Happy Organisation CIC? This is not a drill.

We've secured funding with The University of Lincoln via South East Network for Social Sciences for a fully funded PhD studentship assessing the impact of the Body Happy Schools whole school culture change programme.

This is an incredible opportunity for those interested in academic research which leads to meaningful social impact, including via in-person delivery in schools and policy recommendations.

The successful applicant will be involved with facilitating our sessions with staff and students, from primary through to secondary, and will develop many transferable skills alongside honing their research expertise. The award includes full payment of university fees and provides a tax free stipend of £19,237 per year.

You can read the full ad here, and find out more about the opportunity, including how to apply (the SENSS Director is running webinars talking prospective applicants through the application process too) on the SENSS website, linked below.