Lord Bird MBE

The Lord Bird MBE is a social entrepreneur, author and Crossbench peer, and the founder of The Big Issue. John Bird was born in 1946 in a Notting Hill slum, the third of six sons in a poor London Irish family. He was homeless at five, lived in an orphanage between the ages of seven and ten, and was frequently excluded from school. He learned to read and write in prison. After art school he set up a printing and publishing business in London, which he ran for two decades, before co-founding The Big Issue with Gordon Roddick in 1991. The Big Issue is a weekly magazine sold by vendors who are homeless or vulnerably housed, who buy each copy and keep the difference. It has sold more than 200 million copies and is the world's most widely circulated street paper. Lord Bird sits on the board of The Big Issue Group, a certified B Corp whose businesses include Big Issue Invest, the social investment arm he co-founded in 2005. He was appointed MBE in 1995 for services to homeless people, named E