In this interview, Todd Baldwin shares why he co-founded the platform Crafted for international food lovers usecrafted.com, @cookwithcrafted

What inspired you to start your own business?
I was always interested in entrepreneurship, but didn’t initially have any venture capitalist or technology startup connections. When I came to Princeton, it became my prerogative to connect with people who were engaging in these spaces. As part of this process, I started a company while still at university that was initially providing solar powered water filtration to developing regions. Over the winter break we built a solar powered water filtration system in Kenya. We later realised the problem was deeper than just producing low cost water filtration. The water needed to be delivered, so we started to focus on finding a solution to getting water delivered to everyone’s doorstep.

During the COVID-19 pandemic I couldn’t travel to Kenya to develop WellPower Technologies. I began thinking about what I wanted to do after college. I asked myself if I wanted a ‘traditional’ job or if I wanted to try something else. At that time, I started to get into cooking with my sister and I watched endless cookery videos. I realised that a lot of the mainstream food shows on the TV didn’t show the food that we grew up with — I’m from the South. Food is so tied to culture and identity. Diverse cultures are not represented in mainstream media. I wanted to build a unique business that solved this problem.
​
How did you develop your business idea?
I started talking to more food blogging friends to find out how the system works. I became aware of why food videos from diverse cultures are so hard to find. It’s very hard to drive traffic back to your site unless a large food account posts one of your recipes because they’re catered to the mainstream audience. They don’t give a whole lot of exposure to niche cuisine. I wouldn’t consider African food a niche cuisine — there’s an entire continent of diverse dishes!

What does Crafted do?
Crafted is a live streaming platform for food content creators. Creators can create paid or free live streams on our platform, collect tips, engage with fans through live chat functions, and get booked for private virtual events. Crafted celebrates culture through food. What really excites me is that Crafted empowers others to build small businesses, sustain themselves, do something they love and at the same time share more on their culture. I would really be excited if ten years from now a group of millionaires were created through using Crafted alone.

What have been the main challenges in setting up Crafted?
To date, meeting people and looking for investors online. It is great to meet people consistently in person but it has been so hard to do during the times of COVID-19. We are still fairly young and there are many more challenges to come.
​
What pieces of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Just like Nike, just do it! If it’s not your main gig, really try to work on it on evenings and weekends.

Start small and distill your idea down to a minimum viable product. Think about the simplest way you can prove people want what you’re building. In general, that should only take you a week or two to build. If it’s taking too long than that, you aren’t thinking simple enough, make it as simple as you possibly can. You could make a landing page with a one liner about your company and drive traffic to it. That would be perfect proof in people wanting what you’re trying to build.
Test early. Increased interaction will help you gain confidence in your idea. You’ll feel much better about developing the idea further.

Create a bank of ideas. I have a list of ideas on my phone that I’m constantly adding to as soon as an idea comes to me. I’ve a compilation of hundreds of ideas that I could be working on for a startup. I’ve found it has boosted my creative thinking.

If you have more than one business idea, take a step back and think about what type of business you want to build and why. Do you dream of starting up a venture backable business that scales rapidly or do you want to set up a lifestyle brand? I’d recommend focusing on the idea that has the biggest market opportunity. Which one do you feel you are uniquely-mostly equipped for? Which one is your skill set mostly aligned with? Do you see a path where you can turn the idea into a fast growing company? Whatever you do, you need to be incredibly passionate about it because it’s going to be a long road.
​
Todd Baldwin graduated from Princeton University in Chemical Engineering. During his undergraduate studies, he co-founded WellPower Technologies, a company that provided on-demand clean water delivery in Kenya through a smartphone application.

Not only does the teaching profession need to be more sustainable but also our vision, curricula and pedagogy for affording our students a real purpose for learning and fostering immersion. Children in primary settings are already generating creative ideas and demonstrating active interest in helping adults ensure they grow up in a world that is protecting their future, and adolescence is the pivotal time for developing their “executive function skills”.¹ In my experience, pupils are bursting with imagination and ambition when passionate about the change(s) they want to actualise for the planet they inhabit. They seem uninhibited by barriers and their eagerness to get going in the here and now is palpable. Their energy needs to be celebrated and harnessed for the sustainability of enriching and progressive education, which can be profoundly manifested in them being agents for change in community contexts for a global landscape.
​
“Civic engagement is key for sustainability”.² We need imagination to go beyond and fuse Reading, Writing and Arithmetic into ambitious cross-curricular lesson planning to reveal to our students the interdependence of the environment, economy and society for reaching the depths of understanding required for shaping a better world. Generation Z is the future and so have an inherent interest in becoming thoughtful and proactive citizens in the process. This inclusive approach enables pupils to do the work themselves. Research and evidence-based findings prove that when students identify with a real world problem they exercise metacognitive strategies as their passion and commitment for problem-solving drives them to achieve longer term outcomes.³ Sustainability is a lens through which children and indeed, education institutions can examine local and wider reaching topics. In this way, connections between environmental integrity, social equity and economic prosperity can be appreciated as codependent and interconnected across the world. We can shift perspective to integrative learning for developing awareness around sustainability, and for understanding and skills to tackle its related dilemmas. Ethical leadership for adults and aspirational ethical leadership for students. Nourishing and challenging sustenance is required to feed children’s appetite for learning and it is for us as educators to facilitate opportunities for their authentic discoveries of the world around them and provide platforms upon which they can make the difference they determinedly champion.

Parallels can be drawn for the benefit of sustaining educators. By making a career in teaching more sustainable and creating learning around sustainability for students, education can support and initiate efforts for a ‘greener’ future. Protecting the professionalism and wellness of educators enables them to do the vital work that brought them to teaching in the first place, ultimately benefiting students. My interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs⁴ reminds us to ensure the basics are met for educators and pupils, and sustainability is at the heart of creating humane conditions for teaching and learning.⁵

Ecological sustainability views human beings as part of nature and Orr⁶ encourages us to use nature as a model for growth. I believe we can synergise growth and sustainability if we lead, teach and model the importance of taking care of our precious resources for ‘greener’ growth.

We need to rethink our teaching and learning objectives to deconstruct the mystery and sometimes overly complicated definitions of sustainability for all students (and adults) to grasp. And in doing so create an interdisciplinary curriculum with hands-on activities in place-based and service contexts. Helping to improve their school, neighbourhood and planet will give students life meaning and their worldview will expand as global issues are tackled from organic purposeful work. Sustainability will no longer be an abstract concept but instead as tangible and expected in their school day as the 3 R’s. Ideally, sustainability will be embedded into the culture, ethos and values of education and the 3 R’s will form part of a unified approach, which given the limits of the earth, will be unshakeable.
​
Kirsty Knowles is an Education Leader and recent Head of a Junior School.
References
1. Center on the Developing Child. (2012) Executive Function (InBrief).
From: www.developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/what-is-executive-function-and-how-does-it-relate-to-child-development/
2. Strategies for Education for Sustainability
From: www.kdp.org/initiatives/pdf/efsguide_section2.pdf
3. Center on the Developing Child. (2012) Executive Function (InBrief).
From: www.developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/what-is-executive-function-and-how-does-it-relate-to-child-development/
4. Maslow, A. (1943) A theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396.
5. Farber, K. (2020) www.edutopia.org/article/7-ways-make-teaching-more-sustainable-profession
6. Orr, D. (1991) Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. State University of New York Press.

Howbury School is based in Lagos and organises a summer internship for students to develop innovative solutions to sustainable development goals. This article shares how students in years 9 and 13 created an application to resolve local waste disposal problems.

Identifying the community issue
When walking around the Mende community of Maryland, students noticed that the Lagos State Waste Management Agency (LAWMA) waste disposal facilities were left uncleared and were spilling into the road. The students were concerned about the adverse effects this was having on the environment and the community.

Taking action
The students brainstormed ways they could resolve the waste issue and decided to create a waste management application. Using their knowledge of web programming, Python programming language and the Django web framework, the students created a community waste alert blog where members of the community could take a photograph of any uncleared heap of waste and could add its location so that LAWMA officials were alerted and cleared the rubbish. Students received coaching on how they could build their web-based application throughout the project from Mr. Biodun Ayobami, a LAWMA engineer. When the students had completed the web aspect of the project, they shared the live web blog to their school community and parents. Interns then challenged the local community to test the application by taking photographs of any uncollected waste and uploading them to the blog.

Reflection
This project involved careful planning. The students engaging with the external expert played a crucial role in the development of the application. The external expert mentored the students and provided them with critical feedback on how they could develop their product through drawing upon his own professional experience. We recommend for students to have basic knowledge in Python and Django before attempting such a project. This internship programme gave students hands-on experience of developing an application to resolve local waste disposal problems.

Howbury School is a family oriented Nursery and Primary School offering a blend of the Nigerian and English National curriculum.
​