Lizzie Sullivan - Founder of Whole Again Communities

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

I can’t choose just one! First, my two children. Second, setting up Whole Again Communities – a space where lovely ordinary people in Treneere and the surrounds can come together and gain confidence to work towards reaching their potential. And finally, still gig rowing (badly) and loving it even more at 60.

What motivates you to do what you do?

My absolute passion and desire to give people a chance; people who have been discriminated against and/or who live in a part of our community that has been under-resourced. To give them the opportunity to build their confidence and reach their potential. To give them the opportunity to learn and achieve in a more practical hands-on way through cooking, gardening and upcycling. As an intelligent capable woman who has lived with the frustrations of trying to learn and achieve with a dyslexic, dyspraxic ADHD brain, I feel well equipped to understand a bit about how people can become/accept the labels they are given: lazy, stupid, a nightmare, all over the place. I wanted do well at school. I enjoyed learning and I liked expressing my views and opinions even though I was very shy. However, I couldn’t put things down on paper. I was, and still am, ashamed of my handwriting and felt, and still feel, constantly stressed and frustrated by my lack of ability to remember things and organise myself and my time.

I’m a very practical person who loves food and nutrition and caring for people in our local community and for our natural environment. I’m passionate about sharing this with others.

What do you owe your mother?

The ability to laugh and cry easily. An Irish sense of humour, practicality, bluntness, determination and an all-round general appreciation and joy for the simple things of life: family, friendship, food laughter and travel. She taught me the principles of basic healthy eating, using homegrown produce and eating a homemade diet on a budget and without waste. Anything we did not eat was kept for the next meal or fed to our dogs.

Also, my dyslexic/ADD brain.

Which women inspire you and why?

Goodness…so many! My dear friend Mo O’Brien has just completed a fundraising row of 3,000 miles across the Atlantic – Mo is 60-years-old and is deaf.

Women I have the good fortune to work with at WAC like Jo Crooky and Emma Harvey – hardworking, down-to-earth mothers with social consciences, who care amazingly well for children with learning challenges. These women manage their families, while dealing with challenging work and self-employment situations, but still find time to support others in their community,

Suzy Messenger, Isabella Moriarty, Judith Kingdom and Janet Ross for helping me to see and develop my own potential

Shirley Pitts, Anna Murphy, Sarah Judd, Lynne Coakley, Maria McEwan and Sue Nankervis – all amazing, strong, calm, resilient role models who have the ability to turn trauma and heartache into challenges for future motivation and success.

My daughter Yasmin inspires me with her strength and sensitivity when standing up for people. Yasmin can challenge a lack of fair play and articulate her position with passion and flair. She is a better and clearer version of myself with much untapped potential.

What are you reading?

Foodie nutrition stuff. Self-care stuff. I have a manic mind and I read quite slowly so I tend to flick through magazines and papers, but I have a big pile of books on the table beside my bed!

For relaxation, I read authors like Maeve Binchy. Any old crap really, particularly light-hearted funny books, about real people and real places. Irish novelists are my favourites.

I watched the film ‘The Reader’ years ago, and it had a profound lifelong effect on me. I’m currently reading this book. It’s about a German woman working as a warden in a concentration camp during WWII. She is ashamed of not being able to read, and so accepted the blame for signing the authorisation papers to have Jews sent to gas chambers, rather than have people find out she was illiterate.

What gender barriers have you had to hurdle?

From my early childhood living on the farm in a rural community in Ireland with four brothers, I was aware of gender stereotyping at this time. For example, when my mum went out to work, and had seven children all living at home, as the oldest girl I was expected to wait on my dad and brothers. I strongly challenged this.

Having spent much of my adult working life in support work in a predominantly strong female-orientated environment I have not been so conscious of gender barriers.

I have observed that in meetings, for example, some men “make fun of” me and other women who take the lead by rolling their eyes.

How can the world be made a better place for women?

Oh God… where to start? For me, it’s about making the place I love, Penzance, its people and communities and environment, the best they can be. We need more openness and fairness in distributing funding to provide more opportunities for women (and everyone really) to support them to earn a better living.

We need more education to help change attitudes about life stages, especially menopause. I’ve had the great fortune to have met and now sometimes work with Isabella Moriarty (who is an expert on menopause self-care).

We need better opportunities for woman to work flexi-hours or to work remotely. I often do my most productive reports, plans or funding bids from the comfort of my PJs and very comfy bed.

Describe your perfect day?

It wouldn’t be any one particular day. Any day where I have slept well and wake refreshed, have a sense of purpose doing something I enjoy – that could be work, walking on the beach or spending time with special friends. The most delightful and life-affirming thing that I do at this current stage of my life is spending time on the beach or walking the cliffs and countryside with my husband and gorgeous four-year-old grandson Charlie and my 16-year-old granddaughter Mia.

I love the rainy days where I stay in my PJs watching rubbish telly or reading, surfing social media, organising my busy calendar or creating lots of meals from a few basic ingredients.

We've noticed there really aren't many (if any) statues of women around Cornwall - who would you see remembered?

I’d never really thought about this before! It’s a very good question!

Helen Glover, Mo ’Brien, Helen Swift, Rowena Cade … I’m afraid I don’t know enough about local historical women.

Perhaps a collage of all the lovely hardworking down-to-earth role models I have the pleasure to know and meet at my home and workplace, on the Treneere Estate. (I do have a simple idea up my sleeve for more local arty people to do something.)

Give us a tip?

The age-old tip: Keep it simple. Accept what you can’t change and change what you can. Enjoy our local environment, and use our lovely local shops and small businesses (Thornes, The Peat Project, Bosavern Farm, Archie Browns, local markets and refill projects). Walk, cycle or use public transport more. Take advantage of the many repair cafes that are popping up in our community.

Use a flask or other reusable container, challenge plastic waste and where possible only buy stuff that’s not wrapped in plastic and excess packaging.

If you ever get a chance to attend one of Isabella Moriarty’s workshops on menopause self-care, I hope you enjoy it and appreciate it as much as I have.

About Lizzie Lewis/Sullivan: I was born on a farm in the wilds of West Cork in Southern Ireland in 1959, oldest girl of seven siblings. My family moved to the London suburb of Bexleyheath when I was 9 years old, for better work prospects for us all.  

At age 27, I visited Penzance for a weekend and fell in love with it. I moved here within six weeks.

I missed my job as manager of a small healthy eating café in Greenwich and yearned for a catering opportunity. I fell in love with Dandelions in Causeway head (it sadly ceased trading around 20 years ago) and the now thriving Archie Browns.

I completed a catering/chef course and was developing a program of healthy eating recipes to deliver part-time courses at a local college; at the same time, I became pregnant. I put most career aspirations to one side and concentrated on being a mum. With no family in Cornwall and my then husband a fisherman, I could see no way to combine parenting and work for a few years at least.

I started work for CN4C when my children were in full-time education and absolutely loved working as a Community Learning support worker. However, the challenges of being dyslexic/ADD made it impossible for me to continue working in conventional learning and training environment.

I came up with the idea to reach out to and support the lovely ordinary people in my community, and began to devise soup recipes to improve my health whilst on a tight budget. I went on to set up Whole Again Communities in September 2013.

About Whole Again Communities

Whole Again Communities (WAC) is a social enterprise which encourages and supports people to learn to cook good quality, affordable food from scratch so that they can embrace healthy eating at home.

Whole Again Communities is progressing towards being self-funding through catering events – our catering service is available for meetings, workshops, weddings, parties and many more occasions, all reasonably priced and super healthy!

Whole Again Communities is a Community Interest Company. Started by Liz Sullivan in 2013 and founded on the stone soup principles, Liz began by running workshops for other women living on a shoestring budget with an interest in healthy eating. These workshops were such a success that the people who attended went on to help set up the weekly Open House, and in January 2016 we acquired our own venue which enabled us to expand our offer to more workshops, catering for outside events and offering venue hire.