Cemal Ezel, Founder of Change Please - an award-winning social enterprise that provides paid training, employment and support to people experiencing homelessness and then jobs in the hospitality and catering industry. Here he shares why paying the real Living Wage is the right thing to do for any business, because financial security is crucial in allowing people to change their lives for the better.
Change Please is a proud Living Wage Employer - it's a commitment that is absolutely integral to Change Please's mission as a social enterprise. We know first-hand how coffee and jobs can change people's lives and how paying the living wage helps us to support people into better lives. Paying the Living Wage has helped us to increase staff retention, secure new business and create a sustainable organisation which now operates internationally.
It was a no-brainer for me when founding the organisation, making sure that we really lived the change that we wanted to see and providing employment where people can live without worrying about the bills or a weekly food shop. Signing up to the Living Wage Foundation naturally supported our mission of providing paid training and employment to enable our Trainees to secure employment and rebuild their lives.
Similarly, Change Please believes that we need long-lasting, sustainable change to change society. Our focus is on empowering homeless and formerly homeless people through employment. By providing barista training and a job at one of our coffee carts, or shops, we help restore confidence in people and re-skill people in tangible, transferable and sought-after skills.
One of the most important and impactful areas of our work is bringing people together from different parts of society that wouldn't necessarily normally meet.
Just as every employer has a responsibility to pay the Living Wage, we all have a responsibility to support the most vulnerable in our society. Through buying coffee, all our customers help support our goal of putting people back into homes and employment.
Not only do we train and employ formerly homeless people, but we believe in the importance of a sustainable business model in the truest sense of the word. Our belief in sustainable business extends from the consumer back to the producer of the bean. The coffee business for too long has exploited farmers and baristas alike, leaving them to shoulder all the risk. All our cups are recyclable, and we take care to source our coffee beans from ethically sound producers. Our farmers are involved in local community projects such as supporting victims of domestic abuse in Peru or those injured by landmines in Tanzania. Naturally, they are paid properly for their labour.
Our work has never been more vital. During the pandemic, 130,000 people were made homeless. To help re-balance the scales supporting the vulnerable, we believe in the strength of systems and safety nets to catch those who might otherwise fall through. We recently took an innovative and disruptive approach to tackling homelessness by commissioning three London buses to act as GP clinic, a mobile dentist, hairdresser, and place for mental health support.
However, we believe the focus should always be on preventative measures for homelessness. Central to that belief is that our employers have a moral responsibility to pay their workers a Living Wage to avoid people falling into homelessness or financial difficulty.
Without paying a Living Wage, our employees and trainees would continue to be vulnerable. Skills and healthcare are crucial components, but the existence of a fair wage underpins them. Many of our employees know what it is like to scrape by. A fair wage acts as a barrier against our employees and their families slipping into such an existence again.
We know that the work we support people with is not all that they are. By paying a Living Wage, we help support people to develop people in all the other areas of their lives, ensuring the strength of a happy and fulfilled workforce.
Finally, it hasn't gone unnoticed that the hospitality industry has been struggling post-pandemic to recruit and retain staff - with many well-known high street names upping wages to stand out amongst their competition. We know that paying a decent wage goes a long way in standing out against other employers who only pay the government minimum.
Paying the Living Wage has and always will be the right thing to do for our business to create a fairer society, so we encourage other businesses, especially hospitality employers who may be currently struggling to recruit and retain staff, to join us and nearly 9000 other UK Employers and become accredited.