How to make a difference

Robert Egger

2008-04-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Make a business out of other people's waste

Robert Egger is founder and CEO of DC Central Kitchen. The Kitchen is located behind one of the largest homeless hostels in the United States, in a run-down neighbourhood of Washington DC. I couldn’t find the entrance and the streetscape around was desolate and threatening. The few pedestrians were black and evidently homeless. As a seven-months pregnant white women, riding a bike and carrying a large and expensive camera, I desperately wanted to look like I knew where I was going. So I headed straight into the main hostel entrance, where the security guard was on the telephone. As I waited for him to finish, I realised he was talking about a homicide that had just taken place on site. Whoever Robert Egger is, I could tell already that he wasn’t someone who liked to change the world from an ivory tower.

Armed with the guard’s directions, I eventually found the loading bay which serves as the entrance to DC Central Kitchen. It was crowded with small vans. One of the men unloading food into the vast store-rooms showed me to Robert’s tiny, windowless office in the centre of the bustling kitchen. DC Central Kitchen, which feeds the homeless using left-over food from local restaurants, was opened in 1989 and now feeds 4000 hungry homeless people a day. It has also given culinary training to 450 unemployed men and women since 1990, to help them back into work. Fresh Start Catering – run from the same location – employs the Kitchen’s trainees to cater for private clients around the city, and its profits are ploughed back into the Kitchen’s charitable activities.

It was immediately clear that Robert was nowhere near as intimidating as his environs. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the United States non-profit sector, and it was easy to see why: he came across as dynamic, enthusiastic, thoughtful and caring. Not to mention talkative. Like a ball at the top of a hill, I found I needed only to give him a nudge and he would run for a very long time.

So, as a former nightclub owner, what had made Robert turn his entrepreneurial flair to satisfying lines of hungry homeless people rather than queues of eager clubbers?

One night Robert went out with a friend feeding homeless people on the streets of DC. “Did not want to go. Got kind of cornered by people. You know. ‘Come on! You’ve got to go. It’ll be great.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. OK, OK.’” Robert was shocked to discover that the organisation he was helping that evening was buying food, even though this was the mid-eighties, when extravagant receptions everywhere were leaving tonnes of left overs. He was also surprised to discover that nothing was being done to help these homeless long term. Robert reluctantly realised that he had the vision and the skills required to do a better job. “It was one of those moments where you get to a crossroads. In other words it was like: ‘If I don’t do it no-one will.’”

That evening made him look with new eyes at his community in DC, and he encourages others who want to make a difference to do the same: “There is not a business person in the world, nor a general that would go into a new business or a battle without a sense of ‘What’s my budget? What is my inventory? What do I have to work with?’ Start adding it up. Look again! Stretch! Think!” Robert could see – where others could not – how to pull together the resources he needed. “America throws away 25% of what it produces every day. Most people see that as trash, we see it as gasoline for this engine. Most people looked at the people standing in line to get food and thought ‘Woah! There but for the grace of God go I’ and we’re like ‘Those are workers’.” Always ready with a snappy sound bite, Robert sums up what’s necessary. “You got to get practical. Say what you’re going to do and do what you say. Nirvana was a great band but it’s a horrible mission statement.”

Drawing on his experience of promoting nightclubs, Robert cannily planned the Kitchen’s opening to coincide with the inauguration of George Bush senior, having persuaded the organisers of his first presidential party to donate the left over food. “I knew there was an urban myth about hotels not being able to donate food, and that was hard to dispel. What better way to shoot down that myth than to get the President of the United States to donate food from the inauguration?” Now the Kitchen has its homeless trainee chefs bake cakes for every presidential inauguration: “No media guy in the world can resist that,” he says with a smile.

Correctly suspecting that I may prefer not to sit still for too long in my heavily pregnant state, Robert offers to take me on a guided tour. The scene is typical of any large and busy catering operation: acres of stainless steel, chefs in whites and clouds of steam as ovens open and close and pans bubble. In between liberally showering his employees with praise – “amazing man”, he says of colleague showing the ropes to a bunch of student volunteers – he tells me how he went one better with George Bush senior’s successor in the White House, by actually persuading Bill Clinton to come to the Kitchen and volunteer.

The volunteers, he explains, are an essential part of the grand plan. “We do not need a single volunteer to get our job done but every year we bring in seven to eight thousand and that is how we fight hunger.” Why? Robert hopes that volunteering will help remove prejudices as it did with some doctors who volunteered alongside a homeless man called Joseph. “Joseph looked at them and I think he saw all the things he could never be, and it reinforced this notion of, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? You fucked up everything in your life, you’re just going to fuck up this.’ And in the doctors’ eyes here was this homeless guy with a knife. And so each side had these stereotypes that were affecting their ability to take the next step. But I came back fifteen minutes later and the big neat was that Joseph knew something they didn’t know. He knew how to julienne and cut a carrot. They didn’t. And when he realised ‘I know something they don’t know’ and vice versa, the walls came down, and that was one of those eureka moments at the kitchen. We call it the ‘calculated epiphany’.”

“My hope,” he continues, “is that these volunteers leave saying, ‘Oh my goodness, why don’t we do that? I didn’t think that was possible’”. Of bringing in President Clinton, he says: “I wanted people to wake up in Des Moines, Iowa saying ‘Hey, honey come and look at this. I didn’t know homeless people could do that.’ I don’t want people to watch and say, ‘Wow the Kitchen’s great. I’ll write them a cheque.’ That would be great if they did, but that’s not the point. It’s more important to liberate them from their old stereotypical mind frames.” Robert hopes that their work will keep sparking people into “calculated epiphanies” and bring them on-side. “I don’t want to tell people what to think. If I go out and say ‘you should la la bla bla’ they won’t hear me.” That’s why, when Fresh Start caters for an event, Robert insists that the organisers don’t mention to the guests that the food is made by formerly homeless people until after they’ve enjoyed it.

Robert’s calculated pursuit of epiphanies has paid spectacular dividends: there are now Campus Kitchens run out of dozens of universities around the United States, and a sister project called Community Kitchens in Schools. Back in Robert’s tiny office, I try to find out what drives the person responsible for these far-reaching achievements. He is charmingly self deprecating, insisting “I’m not smart. I barely graduated from high school. And I’ve always had good management here because I don’t run all this myself – I mean, I can do it, but I’m just not good at the day-to-day stuff. My attention span’s not that long. I’m not disciplined that way.”

When I point out that he nevertheless has an obvious knack for business and ask why he didn’t simply stay in the nightclub trade and make himself richer, it’s clear that he finds this as interesting a question as I do. “Over the years I’ve plumbed my soul on numerous occasions. You know, it’s not like I have some deep love for my fellow man, that I want to help the poor.” Music has had its influence on the way he views the world, judging by how often he reaches for quotes from his favourite bands – notably John Lennon’s acerbic view of mass culture in Working Class Hero: “Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV / And you think you're so clever and classless and free”. And although the catholic nuns who schooled him probably weren’t intending to produce a nightclub-owning Lennon devotee, they too had a deep impact on his psyche. “It’s probably a merger of that kind of weird, missionary, ‘save-pagan-babies’ ethos of catholic school,” he concludes, “with punk music and just rock and roll in general.”

If he’s not so sure about his motivations, one thing that Robert is sure about is how you work with the grain of today’s world to make it a better place. “The power of the last century was all built around people saying ‘don’t buy that’. I’m more interested in saying ‘no, buy that’. That’s the power of this century. How do you open the masses’ eyes today? Not with anger and boycott. No, ‘be happy and buy!’ That’s how you change the world. What we need is a capitalist Ghandi. Someone who will raise the bar.”

Although he’d be far too modest to apply that description to himself, Robert has already proved he has the capitalist part of the equation sorted. And a few months after I met him, Robert was in the newspapers for going on hunger strike to shame the DC government into stumping up for some of the meals his Kitchen delivers to their shelters. Ghandi would have approved.

Danny Wallace

2008-04-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

Start a cult

I met Danny Wallace, the accidental hero who inspired the social phenomenon "Join Me!" that’s become known as “guerrilla benevolence” and the “Karma Army”, in a busy Covent Garden café. He was fresh from BBC Broadcasting House and had an hour to kill before he was due on Richard and Judy. I had no problem recognising him as he arrived wearing the same T-shirt and parker as on the front cover of the book that describes how he created this curiously inspirational movement.

Danny Wallace, for want of a better label, is a professional prankster. Before “Join Me!”, he’d been around the world with a friend called Dave Gorman, looking for other people called Dave Gorman, which resulted in a humorous book called “Are You Dave Gorman?”. When that project was over, and a jobless Danny was “sitting around in my pants watching daytime TV”, he came up with the random idea of posting an advert in the free London paper, Loot, that said simply “Join Me!” and requested a passport-sized photo. When the first reply dropped through his letterbox, he arranged to meet the sender, “as much intrigued by why he would answer the ad as he was about why I would place it.” After a night of “boozing and curry” with someone who he wouldn’t have otherwise met, Danny decided to set up a “Join Me!” website and print some leaflets. “More and more passport photos arrived and they were all joining someone without knowing who they were joining, or what they were joining or why they were joining and I didn’t know either.”

As the story goes, some initial “Joinees” arranged to meet up and demanded a purpose. But Danny was nervous of meeting them. He thought, “They’re going to imagine this sort of bloke in big long purple robes, making amazing speeches, and women stroking his legs and they’re going to be left with a bloke who looks like one of the Proclaimers.” Instead, he sent some disposable cameras and a Dictaphone with this message: “It is I, the leader – go out and make an old man very happy. Take a picture. Send it back”. They did this and had a brilliant time.

Five years on, Danny spends more time appearing on daytime TV than watching it. Calling himself a “modern day cult leader”, he now commands all Joinees to commit random acts of kindness every Friday. “Thousands of people around the world, every Friday, do my bidding. Friday, is just so that I can call them Good Fridays and so I can make them sign the Good Friday Agreement. I could do Ten Commandments but that would be a bit too much for people. ‘Hit and run kindness’, I call it. You just go up, you do something, you leg it. It’s not going to solve all the world’s problems, but it will improve someone’s day for ten seconds, which might rub off.”

So what sort of things do Joinees do? “If you go up to an old lady whose been looking at a pot plant and then walked away and not bought it. You just think, “Well I should buy it”. You go up and say, “I bought this for you” and you’ve bewildered someone with kindness.” The initial idea of random acts of kindness, Danny explains, came from his love of practical jokes. Presenting an old lady with a pot plant is actually a lot like “sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on her back. You get the same buzz but actually the victim benefits and you feel great..”

Join Me! clearly started as a joke, a humorous idea to sell some books, and stumbled into becoming something altogether more substantial than its creator expected. But although it’s no longer only a joke, the joke ethos remains central. “Doing these acts of kindness is the same mentality as doing a prank, because you need to get over that embarrassment barrier and treat it like a joke. The vast majority of society want to do something nice, but are afraid to. It’s this weird social barrier where you might see someone struggling with some heavy shopping but you won’t go and help them, because they’re going to think you’re mental. Join Me! has become an excuse to do something nice. Everyone always says you shouldn’t need an excuse, but you know, bollocks, sometimes you do.”

Danny is full of stories about the happiness that Join Me! has brought to people’s lives. Like the 83 year old granny in Edinburgh who joined to raise her spirits after the death of both her husband and son within a fortnight. Danny sent her a postcard telling her that he was planning to be in town and would try and pop by. He then gathered together a group of local Joinees and turned up on her doorstep with flowers and chocolates. “It was great because there were all these 18 year olds, and it was the first time they’d done something this weird. We brought her all these gifts, and not one of us left with a dry eye. She was brilliant, a real character.” Even just hearing about Join Me! has helped some people. “One guy wrote to me recently and said he’d read about it just after his marriage had broken down and it had re-instilled his faith in people.”

Even though he got there more by accident than design, there’s a lot Danny can teach someone who wants to motivate large numbers of people to have a positive impact on the world. He came up with a simple idea that can capture people’s imagination. He put the internet to great use by getting people to share their experiences and arrange meetings in their local pubs. And he realised that personal contact is key – a lesson he learned from a vicar in Inverness, who contacted him with this piece of advice, to which Danny responded by hopping straight on a plane to meet him. “I flew up to Inverness and I stayed at his vicarage, and he’s a Joinee for life now.” The more his Joinees get together, Danny says, the more enthusiastic they become. “Suddenly it’s got proper, physical meaning, because there are other people doing it.”

Grown-up people doing good turns, like oversized boy scouts, is certainly a rich vein of humour. But, as Danny philosophises, “I’ve always thought that the most important way of getting a message across is through humour. So whatever you do you should, if you can, make it a bit funny. World peace, stop hunger, stop all wars, all that sort of stuff. I think most of it would be slightly alleviated if you just lighten up a bit. Have a cup of tea, have a sit down.”

Tim Crozier-Cole and Cathy Hough

2008-03-29T04:54:00.000-07:00

Save Energy

Tim Crozier-Cole and Cathy Hough are a partnership with no shortage of energy. Their laughter is infectious and their spirits are irrepressible. Maybe this is attributable to the way they spend their work lives. At the office, the couple spend their time saving a different type of energy. The stuff that usually comes down wires. Tim and Cathy both work for Energy for Sustainable Development, a consultancy which advises businesses, architects, property developers, community groups and governments how to save energy and therefore reduce their environmental impact. They've worked for the company where they met for eight years or so, during which time it has grown from 25 people in a "barn in Wiltshire" to about 200 people worldwide.

Tim, who trained as an engineer, works with property developers, helping them to make crucial energy saving decisions, early on in the design of their projects. Cathy is working with non-governmental organisations, business and government to try and stimulate energy saving measures in existing housing stock in the UK. With climate change looking increasingly threatening, their work is in big demand. Growing interest in a low-carbon future has kept their jobs stimulating and challenging.

Like any couple who work together they have to be careful not to let work take over their home life. A bit of seepage is inevitable though. There's a discernibly high awareness of energy use around their house and Tim even admits to having calculated the carbon budget of the home births of their two daughters. Their young children are the main consumers of this couple's energy right now, so it's even more impressive that they are able to contribute to conserving our planet's limited resources through their work lives. These two are definitely an electric combination.

Abdullah Solak

2008-03-20T05:40:00.000-07:00

Run a shop

Since Organic and Natural opened around the corner from my house about two years ago, it has made a big difference to my life as well as countless others in the neighbourhood. Abdullah Solak is the entrepreneur behind the idea. He spotted a growing appetite for organic goods in Palm 2, the supermarket which he’s been running for 14 years on the Lower Clapton Road. So, when a friend who was running a Turkish men’s club in the site that is now Organic and Natural told him he was struggling, Abdullah saw an opportunity to expand his business and took over the lease.

When it first opened in August 2006 the shop stocked little more than a few dried goods and some cosmetics. On the counter was a box asking for suggestions and Abdullah, and his assistant Miranda, who runs the business day to day, have listened very carefully. Now, the shop is packed with delicious organic goods and fresh vegetables, there's fresh bread daily, you can refill your Ecover goods, buy green nappies and even have an organic cappuccino.

Although the profits aren’t huge, Abdullah believes they will come and is happy to be patient. Palm 2 took a year or so to get going and is now hugely profitable. Organic and Natural is making money slowly but Abdullah is delighted with the other positive effects he is seeing from the business. "All my family eat better since we’ve opened this shop", he tells me. He even connects his brother giving up smoking with his business. "The customers are really friendly" and don't make trouble unlike some of the clientèle of his other shop, which he adds, sells a lot of alcohol.

I love the genuine and unpretentious nature of this business. When I asked Abdullah what the philosophy of his business was and how they decided what to stock, he said that he trusted his customers to tell him what to sell. At the same time, simple touches like using energy saving lightbulbs in the shop, recycling fridges and shop furniture, collecting used carrier bags and offering them to customers rather than new ones, make the whole operation seem to be concerned with protecting the environment. They also do their best to undercut the competition on prices, rather than trying to milk as much as they can out of ethically minded consumers. I really do love this shop!

What's the message for others who want to make a difference like this? It's not a way to make fast money but Organic and Natural is helping many people to live healthier, more environmentally responsible lives and because of this, it's very rewarding for those in charge.

Kimberly Wilson

2008-03-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

Create a Tranquil Space

Kimberly Wilson sits comfortably as she talks, legs crossed on a bench decorated with polka dot pink and black cushions. We're upstairs in the Washington DC yoga studio which she founded in 1999 and has been running ever since. “I think people have a desire to improve and change and grow but they have to have the means to be able to do that, and part of that is a creative and peaceful space where they can feel special. That’s what I hope Tranquil Space will always be.” She’s dressed in all black yoga gear, but isn’t short of glamour – appropriately for the author of a book called “Hip Tranquil Chick”.

Like many social entrepreneurs, Kimberly’s business idea arose from an unfulfilled need in her own life. “I wanted a place where people could come and really feel like they are special. I think of Cheers, where ‘everybody knows your name’. I think that’s so important.” In 1999 she couldn’t find such a place in her home town of Washington DC, so she set up Tranquil Space, with the aim of serving people who were also looking for a refuge through yoga. “The whole reason the business was created was to bring people together who I thought would connect and enjoy this type of a setting. We are here to help create a tranquil space within our society.”

She was propelled into social enterprise by dissatisfaction with her existing career. “I remember the Monday I came back to my job as a paralegal after spending two weeks having a fabulous experience learning to teach yoga in Santa Barbara, and crying. ‘This just isn’t me! I can’t do this anymore!’ I decided then that I’d just quit, live off my savings and teach yoga from my front room. It was scary. You go from getting a regular pay check and health insurance, to ‘Can I cover my rent and buy groceries?’” Family and friends were not entirely supportive, either: “‘What the hell?’ ‘Why did I put you through college?’ ‘What are you doing?’ That’s why I’m so proud of the success of the studio, because other people didn’t think this could happen.”

There’s no mark of those early fears on Kimberly’s face now, and she exudes the calm you’d expect from a experienced yogi. The success that enables peace of mind has come, as she puts it, in “baby steps. I’m a risk taker, but a baby risk taker. I’ve never taken out loans.” Her first baby step, when she reached her eighth student and could no longer fit them in her living room, was to rent a church hall. Now, although she insists “I don’t think I’ve got the full entrepreneurial spirit that I’d like to have”, her business occupies a bright and airy two-level commercial premises close to DC’s vibrant Dupont Circle and welcomes over 600 students a week. “You have to be profitable to survive or we wouldn’t be here,” she says, “but that’s not why the studio was created. I had no idea that we would make money, or that we would have this many students. No idea.”

Although evangelical about the benefits of yoga – “I think you walk a little differently when you leave class. People come to me and say that this place has really made a difference in their lives” – Kimberly’s horizons are broader. “ I think what we need so much in this world is to feel like we matter, that somebody cares, and that’s what I want people to feel like when they come here. I encourage the teachers to be as nurturing as possible – to touch every student, and learn their names – but also empowering and challenging. An overall theme of the studio is empowerment,” With that in mind, Tranquil Space runs regular “Trunk Shows”, which give local female creatives a chance to sell their own wares – “empowering women to create, to test the market and see if there’s a possibility for them to do this full-time.” There are also “creativity circles”, which “started in my living room, too. We have a lot of women do crazy things after it.” A fashion boutique and spa treatments presumably don’t harm the bottom line – “it’s really important to be a little indulgent here and there” – but are ancillary to the main purpose of “really helping, I mean honestly helping students to find a creative space. And also for us to translate this creative and tranquil space into society.”

It can’t have been an easy task to take to scale a business which is so firmly rooted in personal contact, but Kimberly appears to be pulling it off – the flask of tea and pile of cookies on a table crammed between brightly-coloured yoga mats continue a tradition that dates back to the home-made chai she served to her students after her first class. Her transparent lack of cynicism must be a major factor in avoiding a creeping corporate feel. This becomes apparent when I comment on the logos of four charities displayed on the wall as being the main beneficiaries of the Tranquil Space Foundation – trees, victims of domestic violence, female artists and animals - and compliment Kimberly on her marketing prowess in choosing a range of charities which will appeal to all her customers. “I never really thought about that,” she replies disarmingly. If it’s not for marketing purposes, then, isn’t it painful for a small and growing business to hand the money over? “There are times when we need more cash flow,” she admits, “but I’ve never thought ‘I wish I hadn’t given that thousand to the Humane Society.’”

As Kimberly slips into some poses for me to photograph, I ask how she finds the time to do enough yoga to maintain her incredible flexibility and strength while managing a staff of sixty. “I’m having tea with a girl tonight, and I think she’s the only friend I have that’s outside the studio,” she says. People who I knew before Tranquil Space, I haven’t seen them in years. I haven’t had time. There’s been many a seventeen-hour day since 1999. It’s been rewarding, but I would never say it’s been easy. Never.”

What keeps her going is the satisfaction of making a positive difference. “Being in business is great. I think a lot of times being in business is looked poorly upon, as if it’s all about money, or power. But I think you can be in business and really doing very, very good work and that’s what I really strive for. And I’m constantly striving to find out how to do that.”

Jamie Wallace

2008-03-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

Build a website

“Don’t underestimate the challenge of making a free to user website stack up financially” That’s the advice Jamie Wallace would like to give anyone who wants to follow his footsteps and use the internet to make the world a better place. Jamie is the founder and director of walkit.com, a route planner for city walkers. The website will draw you a map between two locations, giving you a choice of the most direct or a less busy route. In central London you can even opt for a less polluted route. You are also told how long the journey will take, depending on your speed, how many calories you’ll burn and how much carbon dioxide you’ll prevent from being emitted.

I have known Jamie for a long time. We studied Environmental Technology together at Imperial College in 1996/1997. In about 2000 Jamie started talking about the walkit.com idea as a way to encourage more sustainable lifestyles. In the early days Jamie worked on the site alongside working for a sustainability charity called Forum for the Future. Since April 2007 Jamie has devoted himself to walkit full-time. With no other income to rely on, this has made the financial sustainability of the site even more critical. 50,000 unique visitors come to the site every month and generate 110,000 routes in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Gateshead. Soon the people of Leeds, Glasgow and Aberdeen will also be able to create walkit routes and several other cities are in the pipeline.

By encouraging people to walk like this, Jamie is not only contributing to the reduction of climate change, he’s probably making the commuting lives of thousands of people much more bearable. Not surprising then that the walkit team have won several awards already for their work and that their user numbers keep soaring. For the time being, the focus of Jamie and his team is to get as big as possible. “Everyone says if you’re huge you can make it work financially. But how do you get huge? You can’t get there until you’ve brought in the money.” It’s a Catch 22 but Jamie is not dispirited. He clearly loves the independence of working on his own project and with so much positive feedback on the site, it's hard to believe that they won't succeed. A big injection of cash would help, but for now local governments around the UK are a solid source of income. The site is a wonderfully practical idea so hopefully walkit will continue to help to relieve our streets of traffic for many years to come.

Venetia Strangwayes-Booth

2008-02-15T03:19:00.000-08:00

Open a cafe

Venetia Strangwayes-Booth runs a café which is transforming a neighbourhood. Before Venetia started business selling delicious coffee, cakes and sandwiches on the Chatsworth Road in Hackney, London, the street was otherwise populated only with betting shops, fried chicken joints and pound shops. Opening such a radically different outlet in an area of social deprivation hasn’t been easy. Firstly, Venetia had trouble convincing a landlord that a smart café was what local residents wanted. Unlike Venetia, they hadn’t been chatting to parents in the local school playground who were crying out for somewhere to get a decent croissant and cappuccino. About a year ago, the determined Venetia cut a deal to rent a tiny shop which she has transformed into a coffee drinkers haven. Venetia’s is now usually bursting at the seams with eager customers.

I visited Venetia to take her photograph on a Sunday morning. By the time we met at about 9.30 the café was already buzzing. Venetia arrived with her two young toddler children and husband all in tow and was immediately organising her staff and readjusting her coffee machine. The grinds must be neither too fine, nor too coarse, she tells me as she times to the second the drips of espresso coming out of the machine. She offers me a second cup of coffee made with the correct sized grinds. Such an eye for detail may betray Venetia’s lawyer past, and is also the reason Venetia’s café is developing such a loyal following.

Venetia is candid about the challenges she faces running such an elegant eatery in a deprived area. Even having found a property to rent, it’s difficult to make a profit. She tries to keep her prices affordable, but clearly has to keep an eye on survival of the business. The hours are long and finding the right staff isn't easy. She needs more space and plans to open the garden to customers in the summer. Venetia says she wishes she’d found financial backing before she started, but she’s learnt a lot on the way.

Her efforts are already having a knock-on effect on the rest of the street. About nine months after she opened shop a French delicatessen opened opposite her, selling high-quality cheeses and meats. The bookshop is moving to bigger premises and a toy shop is about to open. Local residents eagerly await further developments. A restaurant or two might be nice and Venetia herself is keen to capitalise on the recent popularity of farmers’ markets and get the Chatsworth Road street market up and running again.

What has surprised Venetia is how her café has become a focal point for the community. People come here to find out what’s going on in the neighbourhood she tells me. Venetia is clearly an important element here too, always ready with local information and news. She’s an antenatal teacher in her spare time, and much appreciated by the burgeoning population of pregnant women in the area. She’s also trying to set up a traders’ association so that she can save the street’s threatened Post Office. I wonder how she fits it all in, but perhaps a Sunday morning photo shoot with the whole family alongside indicates the answer. An expert multi-tasker who doesn’t take no for an answer, Venetia’s efforts are definitely the start of a fundamental change in this particular Hackney street.