Charity

The School Food Trust

The School Food Trust is the only charity I am truly active in now, having given up most of the rest in order to devote enough time to it. See under School Meals for more info.  It is hugely important I think – getting children to like food that’s good for them. But the truth is it is going to take a while: After all it has taken 25 years to degrade the school meals system from one where caterers saw their job as looking after children’s health and welfare, to one where they are expected to make money out of selling junk to children – either money for the outsourced catering company, or money for the school. I think we need to get back to a culture of good wholesome food being the right of every child, and I’d like to see us go further, so that good food is seen as part of education. We should be teaching and encouraging children to like what is good for them in the same way as we teach them to like literature, maths or football.

I’m endlessly banging on about school food. If you are interested, click here for some of my speeches or articles.

The website is www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk

Focus on Food

Focus on Food, is a charity which I initiated when I was Chair of the Royal Society of Arts (the RSA) to teach children to cook in schools. Today the charity has four pantechnicon buses that travel the country teaching classes of children in schools, training teachers, and (in the holidays) cooking with families in the community. Each bus expands to enable 20 students to cook at wonderfully equipped work stations with stoves, sinks and etc – you would never know you were in a bus!

Focus on Food is one of the partners of the Food for Life program, led by the Soil Association, which has just won £18 million from the Big Lottery to teach children to cook, grow, and understand food.

The Hoxton Apprentice is a charitable restaurant, a bit like Jamie’s Fifteen, that I helped set up for the charity Training for Life which works to get really disadvantaged people off the streets and into work. It’s in Hoxton Square in Hackney, London, and takes 15 young people every six months, most of them convinced they will never achieve anything with a background of homelessness, drugs, prison or just unable to engage in school or training.

The restaurant does a terrific job, with 75% of the trainees able to get, and more importantly, keep jobs. Most of them want to be chefs, but some become waiters, barmen or coffee-shop staff.

A second Apprentice restaurant, in Dartmouth, opens in Spring 08, and there are several more in development.

The website is www.hoxtonapprentice.com/

The Great British Kitchen

The Great British Kitchen is a charity promoting good food in all its forms: production, buying, cooking, eating, education, the lot. We set out to build a National Centre for the Culinary Arts with a food museum, library and archive, catering college, hotel, farmers’ markets, chef’s demonstration kitchens, TV studio, food-related retail, and etc. We never quite achieved it, but bits of the grand plan are happening in various parts of the country, and we have achieved a new practical exam-based qualification for chefs, the Applied Ability Award, which is currently being piloted all over the country.

The website is www.greatbritishkitchen.co.uk

3E’s (for “Education, Education, Education” – or for Enterprise, Energy and Excellence if I’m talking to the Tories) was set up as a not-for profit, and was a subsidiary of Kingshurst City Technology College, (now an Academy) one of the best comprehensives in the country. I was on the board of the CTC and we decided, since Kingshurst had done so well, to go into turning round failing state schools. I chaired the fledgling company and our first contract was to take over and manage a state school -- the disastrous Kings Manor School in Guildford, which had only a handful of children getting even average results at GCSE, and had no sixth form at all. Today, six years later it is a much better than average school, has a thriving sixth form and is a model of school improvement. 3 E’s went on to win the contract for the government’s first flagship City Academy, the Bexley Business Academy, and has since won contracts to design and manage a dozen academies and schools. 3E’s is now part of Faber Maunsell plc and still run by its original and inspiring CEO, Valerie Bragg

The website is www.3es.com

I confess that when Sir Michael Angus, the Chairman of Unilever, Whitbread and Boots (who was also the Chairman of Ashridge) asked me to join his Board I was so flattered I said Yes without a thought that as my only qualification was the 25 yards swimming certificate, I perhaps wasn’t the most suitable candidate. However, I love the place and I ended up succeeding Michael as Chair. What I like about Ashridge is that they relate all their management education to the real world, with a proper mix of the practical and the academic. I’ve just resigned after 12 years and they gave me, instead of an academic tome, a set of French dinner knives! Very nice indeed.

The website is www.ashridge.org.uk

I’m a huge admirer of Jonathan Porritt and Sara Parkin who started this, the first organisation devoted to helping business go green. Having set up and run Friends of the Earth, Jonathan decided in the late nineties that the world had got the message – we were polluting the earth. So he decided to help find solutions. I chaired Forum for several years, and though I resigned at Christmas in order to make more time for writing and to do the School Food Trust job, I still follow their tracks with fascination.

The website is www.forumforthefuture.org.uk

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