The week in good news: healthy treats, period positivity and sisterly love
- By Ana Iliescu
- Published 26 March 2018
- Updated 5 years ago
Spring is finally here and what better way to celebrate it than with a good news round up? If this doesn’t help fend off the Monday blues, think of the Bank Holiday weekend ahead. And all that chocolate…
Prestwich café gives away healthy food and drink
https://twitter.com/Presprestwich/status/963760135914033153
Prestwich café and juice bar Pres offered free food and drink to its customers last weekend.
Chloe Lynch, 26, born and bred in Prestwich, launched a new health food café and juice bar – Pres – last year, and to celebrate the success, she decided to offer free food and drink for a weekend.
The Pres Weekender ran throughout last weekend, with all the customers who came along receiving foodie freebies, juice shots and smoothies, discounts, healthy goody bags and much more.
The Pres menu is known for bringing a tasty element to healthy and nutritious dishes. They use fresh, organic ingredients from local suppliers and take food preparation very seriously.
Their number one priority is taste and nutrition, but they also strive to always make their dishes look beautiful. All juices and juice shots are cold-pressed in-house and the recipes are deliciously creative.
“After having my daughter, Ciela, I wanted to be healthier and wished Prestwich had a juice bar or somewhere that sold cold-press juices and healthy food, so I decided to create a space myself that is family-friendly and welcoming to all,” says Chloe.
“I always wanted to do something like this but Ciela coming along gave me the reason to take the risk. I’ve just had my second child, and Pres is definitely my third baby.
“People can ask us about nutrition too as one of our team members, Aga, is a nutritionist.”
Tackling period poverty
betty for schools, the award-winning period education programme, has announced it will visit 27 schools across Manchester area to donate free femcare products, as part of a drive to help tackle period poverty.
The programme also wants to ensure that all young people have access to the education they need to feel more confident and comfortable talking about periods. Aimed at boys and girls aged eight to 12, betty for schools is designed to highlight both the emotional and physical aspects of period education.
It combines PSHE accredited digital resources with experiential workshops delivered by a touring ‘betty bus’, to encourage open, respectful and honest conversations about menstruation.
“It’s been an amazing first year, we knew that the bus and resources were a step in the right direction but the success has exceeded any expectations we had,” said Becky Hipkiss, Education Manager at betty for schools.
“We’re all very excited to see where this takes us, and are looking forward to pushing period education to the forefront of the curriculum in 2018, working with teachers and schools to give this important issue a larger platform, in addition to helping to tackle period poverty.”
“We know that there is still a huge amount more to do if we want the topic of periods to be totally normalised for the next generation, but the feedback we’ve received has proven to us that the appetite exists!”
Life-saving sisterly love
Nine-year-old Leoni O’Rourke has saved her two-year-old sister Lyla-Mae by giving her a bone marrow transplant, the Manchester Evening News reported.
The courageous Leoni, who was determined to help her sister suffering from leukaemia, endured several hours in surgery for the doctors to harvest her bone marrow.
A stem cell bone marrow transplant takes a donor’s healthy blood-forming cells and puts them into the patient’s bloodstream, where they begin to grow and make healthy red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets – basically resetting the immune system.
When little Lyla-Mae was just six months old her parents, Ryan O’ Rourke and Jade Richards, took her to the doctors as “she just wasn’t right.” She was diagnosed with infant acute lymphoblastic leukaemia on Christmas Eve 2015 and given just two weeks live.
After long years of painful treatment, Jade, 27, said she was told that there was no way of curing their baby without a bone marrow transplant and siblings have a one-in-four chance of being a match.
“Leoni was tested and told that she was a match,” said Jade.
“It was such a great feeling knowing there was a chance we could help Lyla-Mae. There was never any doubt in Leoni’s mind that she was going to do it. All she kept asking was when did Lyla need the bone marrow.
“Without Leoni and what she did, Lyla-Mae would have died. We are all so grateful to her for doing this for her sister.
“And now we have finally got there. Leoni has stepped up. We are all so proud of her for what she has done. I don’t know many kids in that situation who would have done it as readily.”
Do you know a story that would deserve a place in our good-news round up? Whether it is a grand gesture or simple acts of kindness happening in your local community, we’d love to hear from you!
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