Charity sits right at the heart of Cytoplan. Since conception in 1990, the philosophy of the company has been built on the foundations of helping others and improving people’s health and wellbeing.
Since 2006 our company has been owned by a charitable foundation. From 2006 to November 2023, we were owned by The AIM Foundation (AIM), with a share of our profits given to AIM in order to fund its Nutrition for Health & Wellbeing charitable donations.
This is now set to continue under the Nutritional Wellbeing Foundation (NWF), which was founded in July 2023 and is now the sole owner of Cytoplan. The NWF has taken on AIM’s nutritional grant commitments and Cytoplan profits will continue to fund NWF’s grants in the future.
The principles that guide us and our owners are aligned in helping to advance public health through nutrition, natural products & integrated health care. Our charitable giving through NWF has two key ambitions – to increase the understanding of the importance of nutrition amongst health practitioners as well as reduce childhood obesity.
The NWF believes that its funding can achieve change in four different ways:
Changing the system
This includes supporting work that changes policy, structures, mindsets and practice including raising the voices of those under-represented, collaborations, awareness raising, advocacy, testing and spreading ways of working, and research.
Strengthening the sector
This includes supporting the professional development of practitioners, funding collaborative working, developing best practice and sharing learning.
Direct support
Supporting the direct work of organisations to improve access to quality food options, including free school meals, in lower income neighbourhoods.
Independent Research
Undertaken for the public benefit with results disseminated to the public and all those able to benefit from it.
We have continued to support charities locally and nationwide this year, thanks to our loyal customers. With 2023 drawing to a close, here’s an update on some of the charity activities that the AIM, NWF and the Cytoplan teams have been fortunate enough to support over this year.
Grants made by AIM/NWF
AIM has been funding the work of Nutritank CIC since 2019, which began with their work as medical students organising nutrition for health & wellbeing events within universities. Over the past 5 years, Nutritank have successfully made nutrition & wellbeing education for health professionals accessible and affordable, by offering free webinars and in person educational events.
In April 2023, AIM/NWF made a further commitment of £120,000 over three years to continue to develop as a Continuing Medical Education provider for topics related to food, nutrition and lifestyle medicine.
“Nutritank is incredibly grateful for AIM’s financial support over the last 4 years. Your ongoing grant funding has meant Nutritank C.I.C. can work on multiple successful projects and continue our mission to increase and improve nutrition education within medical training” – Iain, NutriTank
Institute of Health Visiting (iHV)
Since 2020 AIM has been funding IHV with their work updating the ‘Healthy Weight, Healthy Nutrition’ Health Visitor Champion training, creating training to meet the needs of the wider early years workforce, developing a digital toolkit and expanding the programme to included oral health and physical activity.
In April 2023 a further commitment of £120,000 over three years was made to build upon this success of maintaining the engagement of the workforce and developing and embedding the principles of effective practice in HWHN, physical activity and oral health across the UK, including the recruitment of new Champions and Ambassadors.
Culinary Medicine UK CIC was started as a non-profit organisation to tackle the problem of poor nutrition training for health professionals. They create innovative and engaging education for health professionals and health professional students that combine nutrition, health and culinary expertise to create nutrition education, events & practical digital resources in their kitchen-based classroom. AIM/NWF has been supporting them since 2019.
In 2022 they launched their online Culinary Medicine course for health professionals to complement their in-person teaching sessions at the central London teaching kitchen and have developed a health and wellbeing programme to support NHS staff.
In April 2023 a further three year commitment of £120,000 was made to continue CMUK’s work with health professionals.
The Food Foundation focuses on changing food policy and business practices to help ensure everyone in the UK can afford a healthy and sustainable diet. AIM provided a grant of £25,000 to the Food Foundation for an in-depth study on early years food and nutrition and how it may contribute to high levels of overweight and obesity in early childhood. The focus is on breast feeding and nutritional value of baby foods.
School Food Matters teaches children about food and aims to improve school children’s access to healthy and sustainable food.
AIM originally funded their project, Young Marketeers, which gave children the opportunity to experience the joy of growing fresh fruit and vegetables and developing their skills by selling their produce at the London Borough Market.
In addition, the funding contributed to the pilot programme of improving the food offer in breakfast and after school clubs, as well as helping schools to develop and implement school food policies that put children’s health first.
In January 2023 a further grant commitment of £100,000 over two years was approved to scale up this programme from 3 to 8 schools in Tower Hamlets, applying learning form the pilot phase and greatly extending their impact.
Sustain – Children’s Food Campaign
Sustain is an alliance of organisations and communities working together for better food, farming, and fishing. They advocate for food and agriculture policies and practices that have the health and welfare of people and animals at their centre.
In 2021 AIM awarded a grant of £25,000 to support putting pressure on the government to introduce universal free school meals and campaigning for healthy school meals. Sustain has gathered evidence for the benefits of universal free school meals and is working with key partners (#Feedthe Future campaign, Soil Association). They have raised the profile of this issue but not yet swayed the government.
In January 2023 AIM/NWF continued to support their campaigning work with a further grant commitment of £94,998 over 3 years.
www.nutritionalwellbeingfoundation.org.uk
Thank you
Every customer who purchases our products, whether it be one, twice or ten times a year, is helping us to support those less fortunate than ourselves. We believe this is a sound business model; one that we are proud of and one that hopefully, in time, will achieve a goal we have set ourselves: to help improve the health of the nation. Our charity work – both on a small and large scale – is testament to this.
We hope that this information has given you an insight into the charitable structure of Cytoplan and the significant role it plays in the day to day running of the company. We hope you can continue to support us in the future.
Last updated on 10th April 2024 by cytoffice
Sounds great. A step forward in the right direction
Excellent reading. I shall come back to read it numerous times for information gathering. I applaud the mix of sales, research & charitable support
Hello Susan, thank you for your feedback. We are glad to hear you found the article so useful.