YW: What is Luminary Bakery?
AW: It’s a social enterprise designed to offer training, community and employment to vulnerable women. They may have been homeless, in prison or experienced sexual or domestic violence and often, if they’ve experienced one, they’ve experienced another. They can refer themselves if they want to, but they do have to have another agency working with them, to make sure that someone else is looking after them as well. We are getting a lot of referrals from local organisations, charities and a women’s hostel. People who have referred women before really advocate it to other women that they think it would be good for. We go through an interview process so they have to be at that stage in their life where they’re ready for work, so for a lot of the women, they’re not ready for this kind of thing yet because they’ve got other stuff to get under control first.
We offer an employability training programme which goes on for six months and they learn how to bake and loads of other skills and then we also offer an enterprise course to women who want to start their own business. They can also apply for paid apprenticeships in the bakery. The community is a big support for them, whatever they’re going through, so we offer some extra-curricular stuff and pastoral care as well.
YW: How do you get involved with this?
AW: I was doing youth and community work before but got really passionate about women who were being exploited and thought maybe that I was being directed towards this area. I stopped doing youth work and volunteered for an organisation in Thailand who provided jobs for women exiting working in the bars out there. When I came back to London I thought, ‘there are definitely women being exploited here so what could I do to help?’ I started volunteering with a really good organisation that does outreach to the Whitechapel red light area, where Jack the Ripper famously was – there’s still women working in prostitution there – so I got to know some of the women’s stories and for a lot of them, they really didn’t want to be doing it but they couldn’t see another way to earn money because they’d never had any sort of professional training or finished school. It seemed such a practical need that they could learn another way of earning an income and we could invest in them at the same time, build a community around them, support them and give them paid jobs. It was the dream to be able to offer that. We can do that for a few of them at the moment and as the business grows, we can offer it for more.
YW: Did you start Luminary Bakery from scratch?
AW: We’re part of a charity called Kahaila who have a café on Brick Lane (East London). They’re opening another one in Aldgate which will predominantly provide work for ex-offenders and then there are two other women’s projects: Reflex which does life skills courses and mentoring support in Holloway prison, particularly with young offenders and Ella’s Home which is a safe home for victims of human trafficking. I was brought along to Kahaila under the CEO, Paul, to see what Kahaila could do for vulnerable women in the area. He allowed me time to research what there was for them already and then start something from scratch with Kahaila’s backing.
We’ve just finished crowdfunding for new premises. Luminary is currently operating out of a very small kitchen in Limehouse and we’ve very much outstayed our welcome at this lovely cafe that we use – it’s a London City Mission café called Husk. They’re great but we definitely told them we’d be out in 2015 and that’s not happened! We’ve secured a premises, and have got rent donated for the first year. We were crowdfunding to fit it out with equipment so that we can launch it as a commercial bakery and double the amount we can bake, double the amount of women we can support and offer other sorts of training for them. At the moment, if we want to do any other classes we’re very limited. The new premises will be amazing. We’ll be able to do a lot more with it; it’s going to be an open café so people can come in and hold meetings there or just enjoy a high tea.
YW: What’s your favourite thing you make in the bakery?
AW: I think it would probably be our salted caramel brownies. They’re delicious, and gluten free which is always helpful.
YW: Were you always really good at baking?
AW: No, I don’t bake at all! I keep turning up to places and they call me the baking lady and I’m like, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t bake at all!’
YW: How can youth groups get involved, either specifically with your bakery or with a similar project in their own local context?
AW: If you’re passionate about a particular issue, such as oppressed women, find out what the underlying issues are in your area; find out which charities and organisations are working in your area and what problems they are seeing. For every situation, there’ll probably be a slightly different way you could help; they might need teams of people to come and help do stuff – that could work quite nicely for a youth group. They probably take volunteers in a café setting; we had an 11-year-old baking with us recently which was fun. Fundraising is probably the most accessible because, particularly with places which support vulnerable people face-to-face, you need to be an adult and probably in it for the long run. But fundraising activities are so vital; they can help those organisations do what they do.
It would also be good to support those local places by frequenting and supporting them in whatever way you can. If there isn’t anywhere like Luminary near you, other places like Pret a Manger have social consciences – they employ people with offences and the Pret foundation is quite forerunning in sourcing ethical food.
YW: What are the lessons you have learnt through Luminary Bakery?
AW: I was speaking at a women’s event recently that asked me to comment on Coco Chanel’s phrase that you should be classy and fabulous; they asked what two things you should be if you’re in leadership. I said that if I was talking to the women we support, I would probably say the two things they need to be are strong and resilient. Because they have to be able to get through what they’re getting through and I think as young people too, there are a lot of things that you do that you need to be able to bounce back from. I finished the talk by saying that there’s been a lot of difficulties in trying to get Luminary to where it is and I have recently been learning that I was holding on to it too tightly and I was trying to make it happen myself. It was only when I got to the point where I realised that I literally, physically couldn’t do this, and handed it back to God that things started moving and I invited other people to get involved.
One of our bakers offered to fast and pray once a week for the premises and someone else offered an interest-free loan. It’s only when you share the struggles that you allow other people to get involved so I think as a youth leader, if you say ‘this is what I’m struggling with’, then you allow the rest of the church to join in and you allow God to move through you.
YW: Where do you hope to see the bakery in ten years?
AW: I’m not entirely sure. I think I flip between wanting Luminary to be a massive empire and not really caring whether Luminary does very well but wanting women to be empowered and released into what they do. So, I’d really love for lots of job opportunities for women and places where they can be trained and be part of the community. I don’t mind whether that’s through Luminary or what ever else that could look like.
YW: Do you feel like you’re just scratching the surface?
AW: Totally. There are 180 women in the homeless hostel that we take referrals from and we can only take three at a time. That’s in one hostel, in one tiny part of London. The sad thing is that I think under this current government, it will only get worse so, yes, we are totally just scratching the surface. But that’s still worth doing; impacting those women will mean that their children and their peers will also be impacted. So if feels very small but the ripple effects hopefully will expand.
YW: What you do works because it is small scale. You probably couldn’t do what you do on a big scale could you?
AW: I don’t know. I’d have to really think it through, if we were trying to do it like that. It would take a lot of work and people have asked whether we would franchise and do one in Scotland or Wales or wherever but I think it would be really hard to deliver the same kind of thing. It would take so much to make that work so I think what we’d rather do is give them our learning so they could try it for themselves – not everything will work the same way it has for us. They know their community needs better than we do and if they’re going for a social enterprise, they’ll know the business needs. It’s kind of my bug bear when people say, ‘I’ll start a bakery’ or ‘I’ll start a café’; I think, is there a need for that? Is that actually going to help people with jobs or whatever you’re trying to do with it? I wish now we’d started a hairdressers because most of the women want to do beauty. You need to really listen to what your community needs – it might not be jobs, it might be something completely different.
To hear more from Alice, check out the April edition of the Premier Youthwork Podcast.
