Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the pioneers of the business world together with the musicians shaping Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today is Alice Williams, Founder and CEO of Luminary Bakery, a social enterprise supporting disadvantaged women to reach their potential. After volunteering with an NGO in Thailand supporting women who were trying to leave the sex industry, Alice returned to London knowing that gender-based violence and disadvantage was far too common in her home city too. Alice sought a way to help and an idea came when a colleague at the community café Alice managed started running baking lessons in a nearby women’s homeless hostel. What if they could train and employ women from vulnerable backgrounds to bake and sell their own products. Luminary Bakery was launched in 2013, described the Queen’s Award for Enterprise as “a community of strength and solace.” The all-female bakery and charity is providing a safe, professional environment and building far more positive futures. Hello and how are you?
Alice Williams
Hi. I’m happy to be here.
Elliot Moss
Good. That’s lucky because if you weren’t, you’re stuck. You’re stuck for a bit. Tell me a bit about the Luminary Bakery in your own words. What’s it about? Where did the idea come from? We heard a little bit about where it came from but from your own perspective, why are we here talking about this nine years later?
Alice Williams
Yeah, so I guess at it’s heart, Luminary set up to empower women who couldn’t get opportunities elsewhere so, women who were really on the margins and experiencing violence and disadvantage, multiple layers of both of those, and why we started I guess was through me meeting women locally in east London where I was working, who were experiencing those kind of circumstances so, either homelessness or being caught up in the sex industry, there’s a red light area around the café that I used to work in in east London so, yeah kind of seeing that up close and seeing women really desperate and living in poverty and putting themselves in dangerous situations every day just to scrape by, in a city where there is so much wealth and so much opportunity but those weren’t matching up. I remember doing street outreach with an organisation and met a woman who was, yeah, in serious poverty and it was in Whitechapel and literally if I looked up from that conversation there were skyscrapers behind us and that is The City, there’s a lot of wealth and there’s such a disconnect and for me, just I couldn’t believe that those two things could exist together and there need to be ways for people who’ve had those kind of experiences to be able to move forward from them and to see a different future for themselves. So, I think for me, social enterprises that create employment opportunities are the way for women to do… for us it’s women, obviously, there’s lots of need everywhere. So, that’s yeah, essentially the gap we wanted to fill, that we wanted women to be able to build a different future for themselves and not be surviving day-to-day but actually building something for themselves and for families.
Elliot Moss
And I want to come back to those issues specifically because they’re big and there’s horrendous things that happen every day, as you said, in London where we happen to be now but all over. Why baking out of interest?
Alice Williams
Well, disclaimer, I’m not a baker.
Elliot Moss
Me neither. I mean terrible. I think I’ve baked one cake and that was with me… one of my daughters and it was banana bread.
Alice Williams
Ah, how did it go?
Elliot Moss
But it was alright. It was pretty good actually, I was really excited because I’m literally, I mean how can at aged 51 only ever bake once so…
Alice Williams
Oh, well done for starting.
Elliot Moss
I want to do it again. Okay, I think she helped me quite a lot. It wasn’t very difficult but I was really proud, genuinely proud.
Alice Williams
I know. Do you know what? As someone who has, yeah, kind of ventured into that, maybe a little bit trepidatiously, if that’s a word?
Elliot Moss
Yeah. Yeah.
Alice Williams
And then seeing the results of it.
Elliot Moss
It’s amazing.
Alice Williams
I genuinely think that is the power of baking, that…
Elliot Moss
It’s like gardening. You put something in and it grows.
Alice Williams
And it grows but, I mean, gardening sometimes it does.
Elliot Moss
Yeah sometimes. That’s true. You need a bit of help on that front.
Alice Williams
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. What we’ve seen is that the women that we work with have never taken a moment for themselves, they’ve always been in survival mode so, to be given the opportunity to get a bit creative and to make something that then someone wants to pay money for and actually like sees the value in that, it brings a lot of value and purpose I think to the individual. There’s a lot of self-esteem building when it works and it goes right. There’s a lot of resilience built when it doesn’t and yeah, I just remember a woman making a loaf of bread and obviously bread changes completely when you put it in the oven from the mix that you, you are kind of working on and you spend quite a long time kneading it so it is… perseverance is one of the skills that you develop but then, yeah, taking her bread out of the oven and giving it to her, she burst out crying and was like, “That looks so perfect” and I think, I’m trying to describe the power of that process I guess is the answer to why baking. For the women, the process that it takes them on but also just really crucially, it creates a tangible job opportunity for them. It’s a vocation and there’s a lot of jobs in the hospitality sector, they are always hiring, and it’s a skill that you can learn at any age and no matter what kind of qualifications or background you have, so it’s quite an accessible skill to learn.
Elliot Moss
The vulnerability piece and the fact that, you know, you talked about homelessness and women that have come from the sex industry and so on, these are really serious issues and I had a glance at some of the impact reports that you’ve put together over the years and it’s extraordinary work. How do you and your team ensure that you are all qualified to deal with people that are in a post-traumatic state? I mean, it’s not just like you are having… pulling someone off the street who happens to be in another job and then you are training them, there’s really serious issues which are both presenting and I imagine, not presenting. Are there people in the business that help you triage that, as it were?
Alice Williams
There’s really good insight and, yes, it is really complex and the situations that women are coming from are complicated ones. As a starter, we see ourselves as kind of the final jigsaw piece in a woman’s life before she is able to kind of move on and live independently. So there’s a lot of work that goes on with other agencies before she even gets to us so, we’re not a crisis response, we’re not emergency services, there’s quite a lot of NHS care and other charities that enable women to find refuge and to have a safe home and to get off the street etcetera so, all of that happens before she is then referred to Luminary. So, usually at that point, she is out of danger, as it were, not to say that there’s not a risk of her kind of being re-exploited so, there’s a lot of safeguarding that does go on so, we have, yeah, quite a lot of safeguarding protocols and experts within the organisation but then also specialists in kind of a few different areas so, domestic abuse is the highest form of gender based violence that we experience and I think that is kind of generally across the UK, although there are nine kind of recognised strands of gender based violence that stem from stalking and harassment to FGM to sexual exploitation and domestic abuse is just the most common so, we do have an independent domestic and violence advocate, which is a certification that you can get within out team as one of our support workers but we definitely aren’t specialists in everything. I think our key focus is employment, so we’ve got a team who are trained as specialist trainers and that’s kind of our main focus but each woman that comes to us is allocated a progression and support worker and those women are kind of highly experienced support workers who’ve worked in the field but then we refer out to other organisations and make sure that where she’s got maybe a housing need or a childcare need or a mental health need that we are joined up working with all those other services and that’s what’s great about being in London, is that there are lots of other services that we can make sure those, all those different areas of her life are covered.
Elliot Moss
All of this is very human, right, I mean this is about people. You must find yourself being emotionally, maybe you’ve got used to it, but there’s a bit of a rollercoaster thing here that must go on in the same way that, you know, people talk about bedside manner of doctors and things and, or psychologists and the sense of really caring about the human but also being able to remove yourself enough that you can carry on doing the same and giving the great service to the next woman that comes along. How do you personally manage that because on the one side you are running an organisation, you are thinking about the structure, you are thinking about funding, you are thinking about all the things, the exigencies of running this organisation and the other side, you’ve got real people, women who as you said have been abused, horrendous situations, how do you ensure you keep that distance?
Alice Williams
That’s such a good question and it is a daily balancing act, I mean literally earlier this week I was on an investor call but I had another phone call about a woman who one of our team was supporting who was expressing that she was suicidal so, literally jumping from those two very different, both really important but one more urgent than the other, conversations and having to switch gears is, yeah, a daily balancing act. In terms of like the way that I process that, I think having a really strong team is essential because I need to know that that woman is looked after even if I am not available and also being really clear with her about what she can expect from Luminary and what she can’t. So, yeah, we aren’t available 24-hours a day, like if she is in crisis, she needs to ring someone else so, we need to make sure that she’s got all the right… the appropriate numbers etcetera. So, for me, knowing that there are other people that can pick that up, helps me sleep at night. I know if I go home and I’m not contactable that – and the same for my team – that they can switch off and know that that woman is safe and covered but we all have, it’s quite kind of standard practice to have case supervision and professional supervision which means you can offload the kind of emotional weight that you are carrying to a professional who can help you work through a) how to support that woman better and b) how to make sure you’re not carrying it and getting kind of traumatised by what you’re hearing from her.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for more from my guest, Alice Williams, she’ll be back in a couple of minutes to talk about her organisation and it’s called Luminary Bakery, just in case you haven’t picked that up. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor, discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker just ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will be greeted with a taster of our recent shows. But back to today, it’s Alice Williams, Founder and CEO of Luminary Bakery, a social enterprise supporting disadvantaged women to reach their potential. So, there’s a social enterprise business but there’s also a limited company. So, you’ve got to obviously make money and the more money you make, the more you can then plough back in to doing all the good things that you do. Is there a tension in that for you or is it simply that, listen, we can’t get bigger, we can’t do more unless we make money?
Alice Williams
There is a constant balancing act. I wouldn’t necessarily always call it a tension but not all decisions that the business makes are commercial decisions, they are balancing commercial with impact and mission decisions so, the business has to be profitable, has to make money in order to employ women, that’s why we exist and those jobs aren’t there unless the trading income is there. However, we do commit to a lot of extra costs that another business wouldn’t incur to facilitate those job placements and work experience and make sure that that first experience of the world of work for a woman, is the best possible one. So, there is a constant balancing act of is this decision that we are making here balancing profitability with having the biggest impact that we possibly can in a woman’s life and then in as many women’s lives as possible so, there, yeah, we run all of the kind of trading operations under the business entity and all of the training and support under the charity entity so we can access grant funding and donations to make sure that all of that is still happening no matter how successful the business is. So, for example, during Covid when we had to close our cafes, that didn’t stop us running training for women because we had charity income to cover those.
Elliot Moss
Is it fun kind of having to be in both worlds?
Alice Williams
Yeah, fun is a good word. I think…
Elliot Moss
Is it challenging? He says, euphemistically, Alice? Is that a better…?
Alice Williams
I think it’s, I think it is fun actually, it is really, I came from the charity world so that is definitely kind of more my background and it’s been really fun experiencing running a business and I’ve definitely need kind of specialists in the business team to make sure that we are running it as we need to and, yeah, I think it is a really, it creates interesting conversations and opportunities I think as well but definitely a lot of challenges that maybe a business or a charity wouldn’t understand because it’s, we are navigating both worlds.
Elliot Moss
In terms of some of those more commercial decisions, are there times when you just go, do you know what, I wish I didn’t have to make them and my real focus is on helping women or would you not admit that anyway? She’s smiling.
Alice Williams
Do I do that?
Elliot Moss
I guess my question is where are you most comfortable? When is that that Alice is going this is my sweet spot, this is my purpose in life and the thing I’m doing now is directly moving things forwards to helping in terns of your purpose to empower women to reach their potential?
Alice Williams
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think when things are going well and everything underneath me is running smoothly, the business is operating smoothly, the charity is operating smoothly and we’re creating job opportunities for women, those women are loving those opportunities and it’s really working, that, every decision that I’m making, even if it’s a really boring one or working on a spreadsheet of something, I do feel like I’m thriving because it’s all working but the difficult decisions I think are, the hardest for me are the ones that are really going to affect a woman’s life so, if we have to make a decision not to employ this woman because we don’t think she’s ready yet, I know that in the long run that’s better for her because we’d rather she… she started when she was ready and then she succeeds rather than drops out but those are the things that I think from my… that grate against my values a bit and…
Elliot Moss
And when that happens, what do you do?
Alice Williams
I have to talk them through with quite a lot of people I think before I am willing to make a decision because it feels like such a big responsibility when you’ve got someone’s future in your hands so, yeah, I think some of my team perhaps think I take too long to make decisions but I’m really glad that I get multiple perspectives through our advisory board and through our senior leadership team that I really respect and we can kind of thrash those decisions out and make sure that we’ve thought of every possible angle before we do make a really big decision.
Elliot Moss
You mentioned it before, you alluded to it, your leadership style and it sounds like it’s very collaborative and like you do need to process things, especially those hard decisions. Is there a particular person that you always trust or is it, is it a bit more of a sort of a cohort of people that then you depend on, depending on the issue at hand?
Alice Williams
Yeah, I would say it’s the latter so, it probably depends on the person’s kind of particular perspective so, for example, if we have a decision we have to make about a route we want to go down with investment then I’d really trust a guy on our board who is really experienced with that and I just really would trust his opinion on it. I probably would still get a few other opinions, just to hear but then, for example, our Commercial Director has loads of marketing experience so if she tells me we need to invest in this because this is what we’re going to see, I do, I do need quite a lot of data to be able to make a decision so if, yeah, I think if I can either be convinced by people talking me through it or see on paper, right this is a no-brainer, yeah I would usually look at a few different things and look to people with specialisms.
Elliot Moss
Just going back a little bit, thinking about how you kind of ended up in the volunteering world, the NGO world and so on, at what point in your life did you know that you wanted to do good things for people as well as all the other things that come with it. And by the way, I’m not implying of course that those people in the commercial world, including myself, are not interested in doing good things but specifically, what was, do you remember if there was a moment or is this just, did it just creep up on you?
Alice Williams
I think it’s been all the way through my life. I don’t think I, yeah, I didn’t grow up having to worry about where my next meal was going to come from and I think that meant I was able to think what do I want to do with my life rather than think I need to make money and I totally understand different motivations but a really good example was in my parents and in the church that I grew up in that you do what you can to look after people around you, so that was kind of instilled in me as well so, yeah, I think the first career I ever wanted to do was be a youth worker, even though I was a young person at the time but, yeah, so then I studied in Youth and Community Work…
Elliot Moss
With Applied Theology.
Alice Williams
With Applied Theology.
Elliot Moss
I mean I like that, I haven’t seen that degree before, Alice. Youth and Community Work.
Alice Williams
I know, a little bit niche.
Elliot Moss
At Gloucestershire University, in case you are interested.
Alice Williams
Yeah, great degree. Yeah, I’d never really thought that I would want to do something a bit more commercial so actually yes, stepping into the social enterprise where there is this kind of, you need to make money kind of aspect to it, has been a journey for me. At my wedding my dad said – obviously a proud dad – “She could have been anything and she chose to do this low paying career.” I was like, could I have been anything? I don’t think I ever really thought oh I could do something that’s a bit more high paying. Yeah, I think just, I’ve always been motivated that with my career, I wanted to do something that helps people, I never really considered anything other than that.
Elliot Moss
And those people you consult, just going back to that question before, do you actually quite like it that they’re not like you?
Alice Williams
Yes, absolutely, yeah and I think that comes, like you say, I’m very collaborative in the way I make decisions and I quite deliberately have built like a senior leadership team and a board who are very different to me because I know that that’s where strength lies, is when you’re kind of covering all bases as it were so, there are people in the organisation who are more like me but senior decision making team are, yeah, a real mix of personality types and thinkers and experiences.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, that’s Alice Williams, just in case you hadn’t notice and we’ve got some brilliant Snarky Puppy. That’s in just a moment.
Alice Williams is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. We’ve been talking about all sorts of stuff. Obviously, in your business, I’m going to call it business for a minute, and like any business the most important thing is impact and numbers of women that can actually be affected positively. You’ve opened your second café in Camden and I want to talk about that in a moment but in terms of the vision for scale, where does it begin and end?
Alice Williams
Hopefully, it doesn’t end. In terms of where, where we’re trying to grow, pre-Covid we were thinking probably you know expand, open more bakeries across London and across the UK. Post-Covid, actually, our kind of short-term focus is growing our online store and also corporate business seems to be our sweet spot. I left the bakers working on an immensely large order that’s going out this week to a large corporate, they’re doing a kind of get your team back in the office treat for all or their sites across the UK so, that is a really kind of area of opportunity for us so, we’re really trying to grow that and it, it just directly creates jobs for women. We’ve had a woman a six-month apprenticeship programme that finished week and we were instantly able to say here’s some shifts for you to do, as soon as you finish that, on getting this massive order out and, yeah, she’s pumped so, yeah, that’s where we’re growing over the next year and then we’ll kind of see how cafés do. They are picking up again, kind of people seem to be out and about a lot more and spending time in cafes so, yeah, if, if the online store and the corporates are flying, we’re probably going to need another production site at some point because our kitchens will hit capacity so, yeah, possibly a new site with a front of house area as well.
Elliot Moss
You’re prolific on the social media, almost 50,000 followers, which some people say what do you mean 50,000, that’s nothing, but it sounds like quite a lot to me, on Instagram. Meghan Markle, opened the bakery, helped to open the bakery back in 2019. Awareness is obviously critical to an organisation like yours, was there a Meghan impact in terms of interest?
Alice Williams
Yeah, absolutely. I think our, I can’t remember the numbers but our Instagram following certainly saw a spike after she had visited the bakery and got to know the women and talked about it and, yeah, I guess kind of given us a bit of endorsement both for the model but also for the product and it’s been really great having that quite high profile supporters. The locations of both our cafes means we do get a fair few celebs popping in, which is very nice, especially if they post about it on their Instagrams.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say, are they happy to then, to lend their, their awareness to yours?
Alice Williams
Er, yeah, I think generally, obviously some just want to be able to live their lives and not be stalked but they’re, yeah, definitely we get a really, really good response from, yeah, people just wanting to use their sort of influence to see kind of the opportunities for women that Luminary offers grow bigger and better.
Elliot Moss
If someone listening wanted to get involved, either whether it was a corporate or an individual, what would your, your little request be to them?
Alice Williams
To email hello@luminarybakery.com and we’ll go from there, yeah, there’s like loads of different ways either kind of ordering your birthday cake from us, you can have a look on our website, we’ve got our products on there but also, if you’re doing events, we’d love to work with you. There’s volunteering opportunities, there’s yeah, a kind of endless ways that we can work together.
Elliot Moss
And just be clear, I don’t normally say that but of course I think in this instance, it’s just so, so specifically important that people do understand how they can help…
Alice Williams
Thank you so much.
Elliot Moss
… which is, no, no, it’s, it’s brilliant, it’s brilliant that you are doing it. We’ve run out of time but I really appreciate you coming in and sharing all the different things that this, as I said, the nexus between the commercial and the not for profit has been brilliant. And just before I let you disappear and run off into the distance, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Alice Williams
I have chosen Nina Simone, My Baby Just Cares for Me and I wanted to pick a woman, obviously. Nina Simone, what a powerhouse, a survivor of domestic abuse herself, complicated life but amazing kind of use of music to talk about really serious, important things, she’s an activist, I just have a lot of respect for her and this song is not necessarily a protest song, it’s from much earlier in her career but it’s one I used to listen to in the car with my mum, so it’s nostalgic.
Elliot Moss
Nina Simone there with My Baby Just Cares for Me, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Alice Williams. She talked about the big responsibility she feels every day in her organisation and you can understand why, dealing with those kind of issues that she is. She talked about the need to switch gears between dealing with a woman’s life and what lays in front of her and also with the more commercial aspects of the organisation. And she talked about the decision-making process and how collaborative she is and how important it is to her to have people that are very different to her, they don’t all have to be the same and in fact the more difference there is, the better the decision will be. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.