Big Way Of Life

Although it may not seem like it, it has indeed been a year since the previous Way of Life conference, and now this one has been and gone too.

This year's conference was hosted by Fresh Beginnings, which is run by Valleys Kids in Tonypandy. It was held in their fantastic renovated church, which is now a multipurpose centre featuring meeting rooms, chill-out areas and a theatre-esque are which is where the conference took place.

The day kicked off with the usual welcomes and introductions and then soon got down to business with a series of fascinating presentations from a variety of expert speakers.

First up at the speaker's podium was Mike Ponton who works as a senior fellow with the University of Glamorgan's Welsh Institute of Health and Social Care.

Mike's presentation was entitled 'Making the BIG Picture Local', and focused on different ways of promoting health and wellbeing.

Next up was Way of Life Support Team member Elaine Cooper and her presentation, 'The Value of Health Interventions'. Elaine gave an engaging talk, recalling incidents from her own childhood in Scotland as a way of reiterating the importance of health interventions.

Following Elaine was Gareth Stratton, Professor of Paediatric Exercise Science at the Research Institute for Sports and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University.

Gareth spoke at length about the evidence he had accumulated about healthy living. Gareth presented several graphs and charts highlighting the state of children's health and the effects exercise and can have on that. He also spoke on how the Government should consider increasing the amount of physical exercise children do in schools.

The final presentation was by Mike Walsh, representative from BIG Lottery, the very nice people who fund the Way of Life programme. Mike presentation was simply to reaffirm the purpose of the Way of Life project and to give some information on BIG's future projects.

There was also a tour of the building a presentation by Valley Kids themselves highlighting some of the work they do alongside the Fresh Beginnings project. They have been doing some really important work in the area and it means a lot to those they have helped as well as the staff at the centre.

The finale of the conference was Most Significant Change whereby everyone got to see the difference all the projects are making, so thank you for all those who contributed to that.

Valley's Kids were fantastic hosts for the 2011 conference and the range of speakers was excellent. A big thank you to all those who attended and contributed and, of course, a huge thank you to Valleys Kids for hosting.