Banish Bad Bread!
Virtuous Bread, Wednesday 20 July 2011
Just under one year ago I decided to take a break from being a globe trotting strategy consultant specializing in financial services, and set up a social enterprise called Virtuous Bread.
The venture is dedicated to making it fun and easy for people to make and find and learn about good bread and in so doing to forge the link between bread and virtue. In fact, I use bread as a catalyst for social change, believing that if we are well fed we are healthier, happier, and more likely to contribute positively to society.
Virtuous Bread has taken me into many new places in which I have met wonderful people I would otherwise not have met. Teaching sourdough baking to the prisoners who work at The Clink restaurant in High Down prison has been an eye opener. Teaching baking and cooking to the children at East Sheen Primary School has been great. Teaching people who come to Barnes to my classes has convinced me that one day the nation will rebel and stop buying rubbish sliced bread-in-a-bag that is full of preservatives and other unnecessary additives. Supplying bread to local businesses and to my neighbours in Barnes has enabled me to forge a local community that is certainly as intimate as it would be in a village.
This final experience inspired me to set up Bread Angels – a course that teaches people how to set up and run their own home baking business. The idea is that students learn to bake, to do sales and marketing (both of and on line) and all about the logistics and admin of owning and running a small business. People have come from all over: Cardiff, Exeter, Edinburgh, Kent....as well as various parts of London. There is a Bread Angel in Mortlake and one in Fulham and I have hopes that more people from SW London will come along and learn how. Banish Bad Bread! That’s what I say.
As a strategy consultant, professional baker, writer, and now social entrepreneur I thought I was prepared to run this completely new venture and in many ways, I am. What stumped me, though, was “who is this new identity, how does she dress, how does she express herself?” As a consultant I had my uniform of sober suits, high heeled shoes, and leather briefcases. As a baker/social entrepreneur/teacher I need to dress like, well, a baker sometimes, a social entrepreneur other times (to go to meetings, meet possible investors, publishers, grant giving organisations), and a teacher. What kind of combo platter of clothes is necessary? What do they look like? How can I possibly afford them given my big aim is to earn as much in a month as I used to earn in a day?
For months I have (literally) been wearing the same things: jeans in which to bake and teach (not really smart enough for teaching, but what can you wear teaching that is smart, cheap, and machine washable?) and my suits to go to meetings (actually too smart and too “establishment” for the social entrepreneur/media crowd who cluster around uber trendy shoreditch). Thankfully, I saw a little notice of a competition to get a make over that was being held by yet another SW based business called Dress With Confidence. I entered and I won! I met some of the (all SW based) team last night in The Falcon pub in Clapham and was made acutely aware of my sartorial limitations in their presence...
This is a story to be continued...
Virtuous Bread is an SW London transplant from Canada. A former partner in a strategy consulting firm, she has become a baker, a writer, and a social entrepreneur, founder of Virtuous Bread.
