Hopeful, not hopeless.
- events9352
- Nov 24, 2023
- 3 min read
When 10 year old Damilola Taylor was tragically killed on the streets of Peckham, South London, on November 27th 2000 it made headlines all around the World.
Children didn’t kill other children in a modern, civilised city like London. It was unthinkable!
London was a safe city for young people to grow up and thrive in. Nobody talked about knives, gang violence and county lines!
London had elected a Governing Mayor only a few months prior to the tragedy of Damilola. Policing powers had been devolved from the Home office to London City Hall.
Damilola's dad Richard was “shocked by the poverty he found.”
I started helping the Richard and the Damilola Taylor Trust in 2006 when working with the Trust's Management team and Rio Ferdinand on a project called “Respect your life not a knife”, also involving and asking for support to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers' Association and Richard Scudamore, Chief Executive Officer of the Premier League.
In 2009, after launching the Spirit of London awards, I became the Managing Director.
Fast forward to 2020, and after filling the role of Lead Advisor to the All Party Commission, especially focusing on root causing youth violence, I went back to the Damilola Taylor Trust and took on the volunteering role of Legacy Campaign Director.
Much has been written about the problems of knife crime, gang culture, violence drugs and the label “Youth Violence” constructed by the establishment. Very little ever gets spoken about poverty and inequalities, the real root causal factors of crime & violence all over the World.
We created the Hope Collective as a legacy campaign that would turn into a problem solving think tank. The Hope Hack was created to change the conversation and give young people the opportunity to re imagine a fairer society, one that wouldn’t continually talk at them about the symptoms rather than seek to resolve the real issues itself.
Tackling poverty & inequalities isn’t just about throwing money at poor communities. It’s about looking at infrastructures and making them fairer and more robust. It’s about creating more cohesive support services and building partnership programmes that deliver sustainable pathways of opportunities.
The funding quangos have created a far too competitive environment around the youth sector. Traditional youth work has hugely suffered as a byproduct!
We need less competitive practices in the charitable sectors and far more collaborations. Less can be much, much more! It’s about community led support initiatives that are values based not for profit. Its about being alert to injustices and aware of the consequences if we are not. Some might call it being woke!
I’m 64 and feeling drained but not deflated. In fact, I led a parliament commission that delivered real authentic change.
Here’s the journey that led to the Hope Collective for anyone that’s interested.
The core operations team of volunteers who created the Hope Hacks are wonderful humans. By the end of December 2023 we will have delivered 24 across the length and breadth of the UK. Almost 2,500 young people engaged in safe spaces with healthy conversations about what they think a fairer society could look like.
The next phase of development with the Hope collective will be the most challenging. You will see how wide reaching and eclectic the membership base now is here on this website.
Can we get all these organisations and individuals to work together for a common goal?
“Our children not someone else’s problem!!"
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