Our Innovation Award Winners

Molly Forbes’ work campaigning for tighter regulations on the way diet products are advertised around children and young people helped shape her understanding of the vast gap in knowledge and awareness of how poor body image impacts students in schools. Her work as a journalist included extensive research and writing on the subject, including authoring two books published by Penguin Random House. At the core of this research was a gap in provision for preventative and proactive solutions to poor body image, and how many issues were inadvertently being exacerbated by the school environment, leading to poorer educational outcomes for students and disproportionately impacting those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

In 2021 Molly launched the Body Happy Organisation, with the aim of taking a whole systems-based approach to the urgent issue of poor body image in children and young people. Body Happy works primarily with schools, to create a classroom culture of body respect via student workshops, staff CPD training, learning resources and a peer advocacy programme.