Love Through Food: Our Founder Takes The TEDx Stage
Melanie Vaxevanakis, founder of The MAZI Project, at TEDxBristol 2025.
In January 2021, a photograph of a free school meal hamper went round the country. A loaf of bread, a few apples, a couple of potatoes, some cheese, a sandwich bag of pasta and a handful of sugary snacks. That was meant to feed a child for ten days.
Our founder Mel was 24 at the time. She had never run a charity in her life. What she had was anger, and a very clear sense that something was badly wrong. The MAZI Project started from there.
Nearly five years and over 125,000 meals later, Mel took to the TEDxBristol stage at We The Curious to talk about what she has learned since. It is twelve minutes and it is worth every one of them.
Food poverty is never just about hunger
In the UK, 68% of marginalised young people will go a whole day without food because they cannot afford it. That number is shocking on its own. What sits underneath it is worse.
When young people are referred to us, we ask them how a lack of access to food makes them feel. Here is what they say.
Angry. Depressed. Desperate. Like I am in survival mode. Embarrassed. I feel like I am not doing the best for my son.
Not one person has ever answered “hungry”.
That is the whole point of Mel’s talk. Food poverty is the experience of poverty. It is growing up surrounded by a lack of investment and reading the message loud and clear: you are not worth very much. It is physical and mental ill health stacked on top of that. Until the people making decisions understand this properly, we will keep treating the symptom and missing the cause.
What our members are actually living through
Our members are 16 to 25 year olds in Bristol. Care leavers. Young people seeking asylum. Young people who have lost family, been made homeless, sofa surfed, fled violence. Many have faced more trauma before their eighteenth birthday than most people meet in a lifetime.
Mel talks in the video about the supported accommodation block where MAZI cooks twice a month. Fifty four young people, each in their own unit. In her first two sessions there, a fight broke out next door, a 19 year old told her about the day she watched police take away a man with a knife, and one of the young men Mel had been cooking with was threatened at knifepoint.
Another day at home.
When young people carry that and it comes out as anger or withdrawal, it gets read as antisocial behaviour. The stereotype does the rest, and the doors that could change things quietly close.
Choice, consistency and community
So what do you actually do about it? Mel’s answer is a consistent demonstration of love and care, and at MAZI that starts with food.
Choice. The thing that struck Mel hardest about those hampers was the dignity being stripped out of them. Nobody chose what was in that box. So every other week we text our members a list of 20 seasonal recipes. They pick up to three, each serving two people. We buy from local and small scale producers, our volunteers weigh out every ingredient, and the box arrives at their door with recipe cards that are genuinely easy to follow.
I am eating more and I am eating better, so I am less depressed. It is so nice to think that people took the time to make this for me. It feels like a gift. And when you do not have family here, it makes me feel like I am less alone.
Consistency. One member has been with us for three years. For a lot of that time she did not engage. She came from an abusive background, lived with PTSD, moved house repeatedly and changed phone numbers. We stayed anyway. Then one day a message went out about what was coming up in the community kitchen, and she signed up to our Nourish and Confidence cooking course. She graduated. She got her qualification. She has been to supper clubs since, and she offered to volunteer packing meal kits for other members.
That is what being a constant looks like. It is not dramatic. It just does not stop.
Community. Isolation, loneliness and exclusion are the feelings our young people name most often. Our meal kit membership, our education work and our community events all exist to push back against that. The kitchen is here, we are here, and when someone feels ready we welcome them in.
Why we are called MAZI
Mel grew up in Athens, where food is never only fuel. It is culture and identity and the thing that pulls people into the same room. As she puts it in the talk: you are hungry, I will feed you. You are sad, I will feed you. You are happy, I will feed you.
Mazi means together in Greek. That is the whole idea in one word.
The ask
What Mel puts to funders, decision makers and anyone else watching is simple. Sit with what marginalised young people are facing. The chaos, the unsafe housing, the feeling of being uncared for, all of it made heavier by being undernourished. Then ask how we can do better by them.
Because it is not our food model that is unique. It is our community of young people, and being led by what they actually need rather than by what looks good in a funding report.
Food is our tool. It is the way in. And it is a real chance to break cycles that have been running for generations.
Get involved
If the talk moved you, here is where that can go next.
- Watch and share it. The more people who understand what food poverty really is, the harder it gets to ignore.
- Donate. Every meal kit that goes out is funded by people who decided to back these young people.
- Volunteer. Our meal kits are weighed, packed and delivered by volunteers every fortnight.
- Partner with us. If you run a business in Bristol or the South West and want to do something meaningful, we would love to talk.
Together, we can make every young person feel loved through food.
