We noticed commuters walking straight past the homeless, often distracted by mobile phones, and straight into a coffee shop to spend £3 on a skinny latte. We thought, what if we could disrupt this journey by equipping our vendors with the tools to sell great coffee exactly where commuters want it.

We recruited homeless people, trained them as baristas, provided them with housing and paid them London Living Wage. We also equipped them with state of the art coffee carts. We worked with local councils to identify sites with the highest footfall and now have 6 carts across London selling over 1000 coffees a day.

This is a simple but significant shift in The Big Issue’s established model that provides a more rounded solution to homelessness. We have leveraged technological advancements along the way to make the most of a limited budget and address business challenges.

A coffee cart can hardly be described as an innovation but the tech within it is impressive. Each cart is Wi-Fi enabled and has a link between the grinder, coffee machines and EPOS system that calculates exactly how many coffees have been sold each day. This reduces any risk of theft and allows us to accurately monitor supply each day across the network.

For our loyalty card, we used Twitter. Instead of a stamp on a paper card we asked customers to tweet a picture of their coffee. We validated the images with a combination of cloud-based artificial intelligence (to recognise the coffee cup) and marker detection technology (to check for our logo). Then replied with a virtual loyalty card that customers could retweet and share. So instead of simply having a loyalty card, we ended up with a social media awareness campaign.

Just five months after launch, Change Please has proven itself as an innovative and self-sustaining business model that is scalable nationally and internationally. We have 6 carts across London and have sold 118,000 coffees. 12 homeless people are off the streets which has already saved the UK Government £360k based on their estimated annual cost per homeless person.

We have received investment from a number of large corporations including Virgin, Barclays, Interpublic and Linklaters. The coffee will soon be stocked in a major UK retailer, hotel and petrol station chain.

The expected outcome for the programme is to continue to grow both the cart and distribution side of the business throughout London and across the UK and help homeless people transition back into society. After six months baristas go on to a role with one of our partners.

Change Please is an innovative solution to homelessness - a long-standing and difficult to address problem – launched to tackle the falling relevance of The Big Issue magazine.

We needed a different approach to solving the problem so we launched Change Please, a mobile coffee cart business, staffed by the homeless to help the homeless. Baristas would be trained, housed, paid and equipped with state of the art coffee equipment to allow them to sell great coffee, exactly where commuters needed it.

This NPD opened up a new conversation with the target audience and significantly enhanced the current brand proposition.

The Big Issue is 25 years old and has sold 200million magazines but the world has changed since its inception; magazine sales are in decline and free titles dominate. Content is now consumed on mobile phones so we needed to find a new way to connect with our audience and help the homeless.

The Big Issue was hugely innovative in its time but the world has changed. We needed a new idea that was scalable and tapped into a relevant consumer need.

Budgets were almost non-existent so we needed to create a model that could quickly become self-sustaining.

The main challenge was the lack of reliability of our workforce so we needed to use technology to closely monitor proceedings.