Andy talks about being a business owner in Newcastle and helping residents into employment.
I'm Andy Haddon, in Big River Bakery in Shieldfield, Newcastle. So I'm wearing my baking clothes at least my shirt with Big River Bakery sign on, black outfit.
Behind me here, we've got shelves with books and cuddly toys and Stottie baking kits, many different things we sell in the bakery outside of just the baked goods.
Well the early days, you know, maybe you don't have the resources. We didn't. We didn't have money. So, right, how do we start a bakery? I volunteered with another bakery to learn enough and then we find a bakery that's not been used and we used that on a Friday and then the council helped us in Northumberland in Wylam where I live. And we would sell the bread in the library on a Saturday morning.
So people would come for their books and their bread and it tripled the footfall into the library, so to help keep that building open in the community valuable resource for the community.
A big part of what we do is social impact, impact on the community, so we worked with the council to develop an employability programme here. So we're taking long-term unemployed from the most challenging postcodes in the city and they come here to bake and learn and build confidence, lots of soft ways that they can develop from where they are to move forward towards employment or training so we've been doing that in collaboration with the council for the last few years.
The benefits of living in the city of Newcastle. Gosh, the compactness is wonderful. You've got this really small city centre. You can go from fields in one side of the city to the riverside in a 15-minute walk, or 5 minutes on the bike. So you can cover the ground very quickly but you tend to bump into people or you want to have a meeting, you're there in so short a period of time.
There's the openness and the warmth that comes with the people, so there's cultural benefits, there's the physical arrangements of the city that’s just been inspired by the beauty of it. If you keep your eyes open and look up .So it's a very practical city in that way, cos everything is so close.
My vision is that the Northeast is known as a place where a kinder, healthier, sustainable food system is happening at scale. Just imagine, if all those people bring their food waste to the back of the bakery and we turned that into electricity and then we give them or maybe reduce the price, or give them food. So there's a positive incentive for them to do something with their food waste and there's a feedback loop and it comes from a community-level approach to the solutions and I think that's the fundamental shift in the emphasis from the individual guilt to positive solutions within communities.
And the bakery is an example of that, it's an aggregated solution, and we could do that in all aspects of sustainability. So we've got to start looking at what aggregated solutions and they're much more equitable for being that. So you've got to start working across the silos, so it's not about transport, it's not about energy it's not about health, all separate.
We need to start working across the silos, join them up and then you're going to do something useful. If you stay in your silo, it won't happen.