I am the co-founder of Change Please, a social enterprise which trains homeless people to be baristas and helps them into onward employment. We provide a job paying London Living Wage, support with housing, setting up bank accounts and emotional wellbeing. We have mobile coffee vans, staffed by previously homeless baristas, located at Borough Market, The Shard, Canary Wharf and Here East, and corporate premises located within the offices of Time Inc, Kraft Heinz, BNY Mellon, Virgin Unite and UBS. We've supplied coffee for organisations including PWC and Mastercard and have worked at events, including The Brit Awards, TedxEastEnd, Amazon's Summer Party and Lovebox music festival. In 2017, we launched three varieties of Change Please coffee in 350 Sainsbury's stores across the UK, and will be stocked by Ocado as of January 2018. 

Change Please has been trading since 2015. The idea came to me whilst on a sabbatical in Vietnam, having visited a tea house staffed by deaf and mute people. All of the proceeds from the tea house were invested back into the wellbeing of the staff. My current role as a commodities broker wasn't fulfilling me at the time so upon returning to London, I enrolled in the School of Social Entrepreneurs. 

My first move was to start Old Spike in Peckham, a coffee roastery staffed by homeless people. We soon realised that the model wasn't scalable enough to make any real impact on the problem of homelessness, so we decided to branch out into vans and premises, as the coffee industry is growing rapidly. 

Since launching we have won an array of awards, most recently I was voted Lloyd's Bank Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2017, Natwest's SEUK Trailblazer Award 2017, we were awarded 'Best Coffee' at the World Beverage Innovation Awards, and Change Please was listed as one of Marketing Week's Top 100 Most Disruptive Brands 2017. 

In addition to Change Please, I am also co-founder of The Coal Rooms and Aside, both restaurants in Peckham.