Proposal Participants

Florence: Florence is the founder of Lives of Colour and has worked for over ten years within community development settings in both the UK and abroad. She is a passionate speaker, educator, and mentors’ young people. She works with them, encourages and empowers them to reach their goals. In 2018, she created the G.R.A.D.E.E.S. (page 4) inclusion workshop, a part of the Lives of Colour training programme, to support schools, organisations and businesses with diversity and inclusion strategies. She recently launched the Authors of Colour initiative which includes a curation of diverse books for schools and families. She is an innovator who has led different projects for the Heritage Fund, Awards for All and was part of the team that founded FestivALL in Gloucestershire. Most recently she curated the I-MMIGRATE exhibition that showcased the portraits and oral histories of the Windrush generation and African diaspora in Gloucestershire. This was exhibited at the Museum of Gloucester until the end of October 2020. In Gloucestershire she has organised Black History Month Gloucestershire events since 2014 and this summer co-hosted the Black Lives Matter event in Cheltenham. She has facilitated summer volunteer trips for students as part of @ProjectKenya to go work in an orphanage and school in Kenya, organised by Nowans Community Trust and continues to support the orphanage and school.

Nabeela: I’m from Birmingham, have lived in Cheltenham since 2010 and AWP, worked clinically in mental health NHS, social care for a number of years. With time the roles become more specific, limited in terms of engagement & outreach reflecting the services. These have been both paid volunteer roles with marginalised communities in a variety of settings including looked after children from many different backgrounds including refugees, these were mostly Afghan in earlier 2000s, otherwise I’ve supported or worked with children, young offenders, survivors of domestic abuse, homeless, learning difficulties, neuro diverse.

Eby grew up in London in a close-knit community where people looked out for one another, and he’s found that Cheltenham doesn’t have a similarly cohesive community. He wants to see that happen here. When he participated in the Black Lives Matter movement, he had the realisation that he’d been prepared for this throughout the course of his life and he felt now is the time to speak out and build something new. He’s concerned that some of the momentum of the summer protests has been lost, and wants to ensure that the substantial and practicable action continues.

Jermaine has been campaigning for a conference of this nature for a long time, and is now working with Florence to bring it to reality. His ambition is to reduce inequality at first in Cheltenham and then further beyond. He’s considering establishing channels through which people can share their experiences so we can proactively help to address them. He’s lived in Cheltenham for the past ten years, and has approached Florence to work on a conference and ensure that it’s a project led fundamentally by the people most affected by the issues it concerns. He’s a Doctor of Psychology working at University of Bath.

Tabi’s worked for Cheltenham Welcomes Refugees for the past three years carrying out external liaisons and media work. Having lived in Cheltenham most of her life, she is frustrated by the reserved views of many local people who do not recognise the limits of their own understanding in these issues, and feels positive change has been happening much too slowly to be of effective use to diverse communities.

Maureen: I am an educator by training B.ED (Home Economics ) Kenyatta University, Kenya.

I have lived Cheltenham for 13 years after having lived and worked in Germany and Italy. I currently work at St Gregory’s Childcare trust.

I have a heart for children and passionate in all matter’s children. I have been blessed to be able to support children and institutions in my village of Wote, Makueni Kenya where I was involved a school building and renovation of schools and organising fund-raising activities for these projects. I have worked to put in place a school feeding programme for Nursery school children from poor and vulnerable families.

My latest project is called “2 Cows Farm Community Sports Project” where we encourage children and young adults of ages 3-24 to engage in sports, we have managed to keep over 50 children off the streets and villages and continue to educate them on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and also on issues like pregnancies, STDs, and HIV and Aids.

Mary has lived in Cheltenham for twenty years and she met Florence at the University of Gloucestershire. She’s wanted to become a part of this conference because she’s aware that BAME communities have been disproportionately impacted by coronavirus, being on the front line both as healthcare workers and as essential community workers, and she feels that the long-standing issues of racial tension and inequality need to be urgently addressed. She’s a social worker and she’s seen first-hand the effects of the way we respond inappropriately to children of colour who need help, and don’t receive the sensitivity that they really deserve.

Natalie is Chair of Cheltenham Welcomes Refugee