‘WE PROVIDE BREAKFASTS FOR 1,000 SCHOOLS EVERY DAY’
Carmel Mcconnell MBE, 61, is an EX-CEO, social activist and author. In 2003, she founded Magic Breakfast, a charity that provides healthy breakfasts for hungry children across the UK. Carmel lives with her partner Catherine in north London. Seeing a hungry child eat is something you never forget. They devour food with urgency. I grew up in east
London. We weren’t a wealthy family, but there was always food on the table. Many kids on our street weren’t so lucky, and Mum would invite them round for beans on toast. Seeing how they ate stuck with me.
Fast-forward to the year
2000 and I was running an ethical tech business and researching my first book, Change Activist. I loved my career, but I rarely got to meet anyone outside my bubble. So, in the interests of research, I spoke to five head teachers to find out if the worlds of business and finance were making the world better for the kids in their schools. What they told me left me in a state of shock. They were bringing food into school because so many children were turning up hungry. I heard about kids climbing into supermarket bins, looking for food, and walking out of classrooms, drawn by the smell of lunch because they were ravenous. I offered to start bringing food in myself.
I began dropping off bagels and cereals I bought myself to the schools whose head teachers I’d met. When others heard about these food deliveries, I had 25 schools asking if I could do the same. The idea for Magic Breakfast was born. The name came from one of the children who said, ‘When I have a bagel and my milk, my brain wakes up. It’s like magic.’
I took out a loan against my house, and took a sabbatical from work to get Magic Breakfast up and running. Change Activist became a business bestseller and I put all the profits into Magic Breakfast, plus my publisher Pearson donated too.
At first, Catherine, my partner of 30 years, was worried about what I was taking on. But she supported me 100% and took up the slack financially. I could never have done it without her. For the first eight years, I did a lot of the deliveries myself, but as the charity grew and more donations and grants poured in, my main role was to raise awareness. I talked to everyone from local authorities to government ministers about the importance of breakfast for kids, built an amazing team and carried out research proving how much breakfasts improve attendance, punctuality, concentration and behaviour.
Magic Breakfast now provides breakfasts to 1,000 schools and around 200,000 kids every day. We still need to make breakfasts available to all, but I believe we’ll get there.
In April 2020, I stepped away from the day-to-day, but Magic Breakfast is still my passion. It’s easy to feel despondent about the state of the world, but this has made me realise how much love and support there is if you look for it. Every day I wake up knowing that lots of kids are going to eat because of Magic Breakfast. I mean, how lucky is that?
✱ Find out more at magicbreakfast.com
‘Children were turning up hungry’