On Wed 12th Nov '25, we welcomed Karen Snibson, Principle of Phoenix P-12 Community College who spoke to us about their Healthy Lunch Box trial, a wellness program design to improving children’s learning.

Karen’s motivation is to close the learning gap for her students. Karen adopts a simple philosophy; healthy kids = better learning. “Healthy children learn better. So why don’t we feed them at school”.

Partnering with the Ballarat Neighbourhood centre, the school provides over 300 serves of healthy lunch for students from prep to grade 6; two days a week. Each meal is packed with 8 serves of vegies (not that the students necessarily know it).

Ten months on from the trial and the results have been amazing! The school has seen an improvement on greater learning stamina in the afternoon on the days meals are provided. A great result for the school especially when you hear student’s comments “this is the best restaurant I’ve ever been to” and “this is the best meal I’ve ever had”.

The ‘Big Dream’ for Karen is to build on the early success of the trial and expand the program to feeding all primary school kids every day!