Mark Lloyd is founder and CEO of 'School Diners', a project that teaches disadvantaged children important life skills through culinary arts. Taragh Loughrey-Grant caught up with him at MojoFest to hear more about his work.
Mark set up School Diners to work with "kids who were seen as underachievers, and disinterested, and disengaged, and disenfranchised, kids who were finding school really difficult, whether they come from single-parent families or low-income families or free school meals."
"I wanted to teach them life skills because I came from that background. I grew up in care and foster families. I wanted to hide life skills in cooking," he says.
School Diners is about more than simply cooking it's about "teaching you how to manage your budget and buy fresh food and cook it and not waste any of it...
And it's about understanding that food is medicine as much as anything else. What you put into your body, you'll get back out."
Mark believes that education and educating young children is vital to curing the obesity crisis.
"If we can get a hold of our young people nice and early and teach them really good nutritional recipes that are easy to make and easy to follow, and give you great benefits but don't cost the earth, surely we're onto a winner."
Keen to grow your online community? Entrepreneur and MoJo whizz Victoria Grech (Mark's other half!) has these tips.
