The Essence of Leon Aarts

Recently, Be The Difference (Susie Steyn as Responsible Business Lead and I, Founder) were lucky enough to team up with Leon Aarts, philanthropist and humanitarian, to communicate his food-related mission to drive positive impact in the world through a brand new website.

Our magic touch at Be The Difference is our person-centred approach. Every philanthropist is an individual with their own values, passions and story to tell. In this article, I'll explain in five key points how we captured what makes Leon extraordinary and communicated this to his audience.

#1 Synthesising Leon's Story - To truly understand how Leon got to where he is today, what shaped his values and where his journey may take him next, we needed to hear Leon's story in his own words. Susie hopped on a recorded call with Leon and let him retell his story. This was then condensed into 'Leon Aarts - my life in food'. However, this narrative also provided much useful context which both grounded and informed the rest of the website.

#2 Summarising Leon's Mission and Manifesto - From the outset, Leon was clear that he lived by his mantra of 'the power of sharing a meal' which has shaped all his social impact work to date. However, this needed to be pinned down more firmly and expanded to explain what this means in practice, including his specific causes. His audience needed to know where they can potentially align with Leon for collaboration.

To do this, we did some detective work (primary- and secondary-based desk research online into everything that Leon has ever done). From a brief audit of Leon's philanthropic work to date, it was his humanitarian approach which shone through, combined with his ability to think big. It was clear that everything was underpinned by food and the power of sharing a meal. However, another related principle emerged: “No one to bed hungry there is always enough food to share.”

Throughout the website, we dropped in food-related quotes which resonated with Leon. What stood out particularly strongly for me is how Leon describes his relationship with food (or perhaps the ingredients is a more accurate assessment) as 'alchemy'. We encouraged him to commit to paper those recipes which are specific reference points in his life and the associated story that accompanies each one. These three recipes for good are featured on his Mission and Manifesto page.

#3 Achievements & Case Studies - Undeniably, Leon has undertaken a phenomenal amount of work in both his professional life and philanthropic endeavours. However, until now, this had never been collected into one place and structured to effectively reflect the highlights.

Our task was to organise this to truly showcase Leon's game changing work. We identified his key three areas of success (as well as being inordinately proud of his two grown-up children of course!). We then retold the main change making projects as case studies that he's worked on to date, amplifying the golden thread of the power of sharing a meal. We were able to supplement these with other media (videos (Leon's own and interviews) and powerful photos), all of which helped bring each story alive.

Leon's 3 key achievements (scroll down the page) and Case Studies

#4 The Visual Element - However, the words are only ever one part of the story. These needed to be balanced with some strong visual imagery that reinforced Leon's story and also reflected who he is in the world.

Initially, we kicked off the process with Leon choosing the brand colours (every hue of blue we now know to be his favourite colour!). Leon had an updated set of professional photos done, again using the colour blue as a distinct theme.

In addition to using multiple photos supplied by him and stories about him pulled from the media, we also commissioned a bespoke piece of art which embodied Leon's 'alchemy with food' theme, featuring some of the 'tools of the trade' so as to speak. We used elements of this artwork throughout the website.

#5 In His Own Words - Perhaps the most important feature about the Leon Aarts website was that it needed to authentically reflect Leon in every aspect and at every level.

This occurred in two different ways. The first was bringing more of Leon to the website through including many of his videos. These served to catch Leon in full flow - cooking meals from surplus food, urging others to join him in his mission, out in the field in the Calais refugee camp nicknamed 'the Jungle'. They also capture his creativity and humour (chopping an onion with only a banana and a brown paper bag is one not to be missed). Then there are the big ticket videos such as his TEDx talk.

A measure of our success would be Leon feeling comfortable with the website. Leon's feedback was:

[Be The Difference] truly captured the essence of my story and built a great message and website around it.

Mission accomplished.

If you'd like to discover more about our work, then please check out the Be The Difference website and reach out to Annie Moon (that's me!) via LinkedIn.

To reach out to Leon, please contact him on LinkedIn or check out his website, Leon Aarts.