Grannies Wanted: Bake Against Poverty

Bake Against Poverty - Online income through old-age poverty

“Vollpension BakAdemy” is an e-learning platform for seniors to provide baking courses to earn extra income. “Bake Against Poverty“ invites grandmas and grandpas all over the world to apply as baking teachers. With this campaign, we want to contribute to reducing old-age poverty and isolation among the elderly.

Extra income for the Granny through online baking courses: Locally tried and tested solution goes global!

Since 1 October, 2020, Vollpension have gone live with more than 100 online courses, with more than 500 participants in our Vollpension BakAdemy. People interested in baking learn how to bake the secret recipes in grandma’s and grandpa’s baking books over several weekly courses and in doing so, our seniors generate a crisis-resistant income source. Win, Win! Now we want to make this tried and tested model of digital senior empowerment internationally accessible. To do this we are encouraging grannies globally to make a video outlining the course they’d host. Imagine these courses being available in our BakAdemy in future – (mmm yummy):

• ‘Sticky rice with mango’ by a Granny from Bangkok
• ‘Quindim’ by a Grandpa from Rio de Janeiro 
• ‘Cardamom rice pudding’ by a Granny from Mumbai

This is how we are creating an attractive course programme for baking aficionados and the possibility to earn some extra money for seniors around the globe, as well as the possibility to connect with people from around the world, in times of increasing isolation.

The societal challenge we are tackling

Old-age poverty: Coronavirus accelerates a global problem

“In most countries, the risk of poverty increases with age.” (Income Poverty in Old Age. An Emerging Development Priority; social.un.org/ageing, 2015)

By 2030, the number of people over 60 years old will double and increase to 2.1 billion.
There are hardly any aggregated global numbers on old-age poverty,
however, the UN explicitly warns that the way increasing poverty in
people over 60 is handled, will be decisive in whether the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goal “1 No poverty” can be obtained. Coronavirus increases the problem significantly, solutions have never been more relevant than today.

Old-age poverty: a world-wide issue

60% of all older people world-wide live in developing countries, where social and pension schemes are rare. In these countries in particular, old-age poverty has become an increasingly bigger problem. However, the UN increasingly observes poverty and interdependencies in particular in older women in richer countries, as well, due to outdated pension systems, missing credit periods etc. This is the reason why old-age poverty is becoming an increasing problem in OECD countries.

Bake Against Poverty - in detail

We will start with an international call to action on 22 April 2021 for grannies to apply (or their family can do so on their behalf). 

The submission deadline is 30 June 2021, then, suitable candidates will be selected.

We will send the successful seniors a live course package with appropriate hardware, training for the platform, format and schedule, as well as connection to our website. On 30 September 2021 we will go live with our international course offers.

We will send the seniors a live course package with appropriate hardware, training for the platform, format and schedule, as well as connection to our website.

On 30 September 2021 we will go live with our international course offers.

Our campaign goals

• To reach 100 million+ people
• 5,000+ granny applications from 50+ countries
• Creating national hero(ine) stories in 100 countries

Our impact goals

• Global awareness on the topics of old-age poverty and isolation
• Political pressure to change the way of handling old-age poverty
• 250 additional seniors employed
• Basis for long-term establishment and scaling of the platform

How you can help 

Please support us with a donation towards our cause, or by purchasing one of our unique rewards. 

We’re looking to raise £30k to enable us to achieve our campaign goals (above).

A donation of £50 could provide for the technical infrastructure and personal technical support for one live baking class hosted by a granny.

A donation of £500 could pay for a granny to learn the skills needed to run baking courses online!

A donation of £5000 could pay for ten grannies to learn the skills needed to run baking courses online!

Please also help us spread the word by sharing our page on your social media channels. Let's get the word out and together we can help to reduce social isolation and poverty in old age across the world!

THANK YOU.

About Vollpension

Since 2012, social enterprise Vollpension has been developing solutions for the challenges of old-age poverty, isolation and the increasing gap between generations in Vienna, Austria, and additionally is a leader in this topic in the German-speaking region. Our core topics of old-age poverty and isolation among the elderly have never been more relevant than today.
Our "Generationencafés" (or, as we like to call them, generation-bridging cafés) had on average 200,000 guests per year up until 2020. Then the corona crisis hit us all, and Vollpension, quite severe. Shortly before we had to shut everything down, we fled to the internet with all 45 of our seniors – and that with success! Now we want to move the formula we developed last year – seniors earning extra money by sharing their knowledge about baking on the internet – out into the world.
The present project brings us one small slice of cake closer to our vision that not a single person needs to grow old in poverty and isolation by drawing attention to old-age poverty, and by providing seniors all over the world with the opportunity to earn money online.

Vollpension BakAdemy

Our BakAdemy is a knowledge transfer and e-learning platform, making grannies’ baking knowledge accessible around the world.

We create an additional, scalable and crisis-resistant possibility to earn additional income for seniors in Austria and around the world, and become the world‘s biggest provider of digital jobs for seniors.

Our OMAsterclasses (high-quality on-demand video baking courses) and live baking courses (baking coaching for small groups through video conferences) get our seniors on the internet, and create additional possibilities to connect generations – now also online.

In 2020, after only 5 months of development, we created our digital baking academy with 3 OMAsterclass video courses (12 hours of high-quality video content in total), live baking courses taught by our seniors, an online shop and a recipe database. Through this we managed to secure the jobs of our seniors throughout the pandemic, now we want to offer this opportunity to other seniors from around the world.