Founder’s Letter

represented by mainstream media and make local voices go global,”he said. “People call us the millennials but we’re the do-it-yourself generation.”One minute Jamal was a sales assistant in a West London branch of Topshop, the next his life changed course when he received a royalty cheque for the amateur film clips, he was uploading to YouTube which exceeded his weekly wage.

Coping with rejection is something that we all must learn to deal with. It does not matter how successful you are, you will always remember when you were not chosen, shortlisted, selected for a role or failed to gain promotion. During the pandemic, I purposefully allowed myself to be headhunted for a non-executive chair of a museum. At the end of the Zoom interview, I was asked by the panel why did I agree to be included. I responded that I spend so much of my time dealing with candidate mock interviews, I wanted them to know that I had also endured a similar robust selection process. In the end, I did not get appointed but the experience has helped frame my understanding of

James Corden famously said: “There is nothing quite like the feeling when you are listening to a song written by someone who you don’t know, who you have never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life.”For me, my eclectic tastes include Coldplay and Rachmaninov, so you are no doubt wondering why we are welcoming the rapper, Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., to our front

Stormzy has said about his school years: "I was a very naughty child, on the verge of getting expelled, but I wasn't a bad child; everything I did was for my own entertainment.”It made me immediately think of my own parents when they read

Following his death, there were many tributes to Jamal Edwards, praising his entrepreneurship from those artists who he had helped to launch their careers, including Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, Jessie J and Emeli Sandé who had become household names via his SBTV channel, which grew to have more than a million subscribers. He said: “I wanted to shine a light on talent that wasn’t being

Stormzy has funded a Scholarship for Black UK Students' at the University of Cambridge which covers tuition costs for two students and maintenance grants for up to four years. He had previously approached the University of Oxford who "didn't want to get involved.”

Back to my schooldays. I was a pupil at City of London School for four years, joining aged thirteen.This year, I celebrate 16 years as a Governor, four times the number of my school years.To me, this has always been about giving back to the institution which most provided me with the best foundations for life. A new rule from the City of London Corporation requires Governors to retire after 12 years. I will be incredibly sad to step down.

Someone who has always been inspirational to me is Lord Levene of Portsoken. Peter has been associated with City of London School for 70 years joining as a pupil in 1951 and serving as a Governor for 37 years. In between, he became one of the most high-profile and highly regarded figures in British public life. His autobiography Send for Levene makes fascinating reading. His first experience of work makes me chuckle. He had a summer job at Unilever in the information and statistics department and then the following year a similar job at Courtaulds.They were both remarkably interesting, but they taught him that he did not want to work in a big organisation. At Unilever, he was off for a couple of days and when he came back, they seemed not to have noticed that he had not been there! He realised that he did not want to work somewhere where what he did was irrelevant.

Like Peter, I get inundated with requests, many asking for introductions. He taught me that it is always easier to agree to help, rather than refuse. I must relish doing more.