"Diaspo exists to enable older adults to lead more purposeful and meaningful lives. Our vision at Diaspo is to unlock the experience, knowledge, and skills of older adults. Our mission is to support, empower, and inspire over 60s to become teachers and we have started with food: running live cooking classes with older adult home cooks.

Diaspo won Nesta's Senior Ageing Prize for empowering senior entrepreneurship, Unltd's DoIt Award, Thrive Ageing Accelerator and Zinc's Ageing Incubator. Diaspo has been featured on Sky News, BBC, ITV, Metro, Telegraph, Huffington Post and more. TimeOut called Diaspo 'the cyberspace culinary specialist'.

To date, Diaspo has over 25 ethnic minority home cooks aged over 50, teaching every week. In addition to that, these home cooks interact daily through a highly supportive and engaged community group. Over 180,000 minutes have been watched, attracting learners from over 30 countries.

The founding team at Diaspo has experience at Google, Caterwings, Michelin star restaurants with advisors including ageing thought leaders, global community leaders, TV chefs and cultural academics.

Diaspo ensures the extensive life experience, knowledge and skills of older adults isn’t lost or forgotten, in a scenario where everyone benefits. Older adults benefit from the chance to work on their passion, while staying active, socially connected and extra income. Meanwhile all generations benefit from learning new authentic recipes, personal stories, and accumulated tips, tricks, and techniques in a fun, interactive experience."

https://www.joindiaspo.com

• International

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• People with disabilities
• The poor
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities

"This project is easily replicable. Already, we are in talks to distribute Diaspo's playbook through our training, onboarding, community-building and marketing in both Canada and United States. The simplicity of Diaspo is that it requires no equipment or upfront costs. All older adults need is a passion for cooking and sharing their knowledge. The teacher training programme brings together potential teachers, helping them to gain confidence and strengthen the community of teachers. It also entails a teacher training programme, educating older adults on the most effective and engaging teaching format, and connecting them into a community of other like-minded older adult teachers. This training programme ensures our teachers understand the fundamentals of both marketing and sales, so they can reap the rewards socially and financially. Importantly it means our teachers are upskilled and empowered to market themselves and earn ongoing revenue based on building an audience. Diaspo is both a community but also embraces the assets and skills of older adults by highlighting the individuality of our teachers. At Diaspo, we really want to highlight the lives and stories of our teachers, and empower them to do so, making this a key part of the marketing. For example, every class is launched with a short video from our teacher, then distributed via social media. It means teachers have a social connection with their learners beyond the class, while enabling them to build their own brand by really highlighting their character and personality. Beyond the live classes, older adults play an active role in Diaspo through messaging that is aspirational and age-inclusive, content curation that is first-hand and an engaged teacher community."