Bright Ideas Nottingham

I am a director of a vibrant social enterprise with a multi-disciplinary team, which I built on the principles/values of the Scottish Standards for Community Engagement. My role includes:

·         Writing funding applications for and leading, managing projects, events and people in collaboration with communities, partners and funding agencies

·         Innovating in community-led, academically-driven research, evaluation and impact assessment

·         Developing and implementing meaningful community engagement, involvement and empowerment strategies

·         Devising and implementing policies, strategies and action plans

·         Designing community-based learning/teaching courses/programmes for adults across diverse subject areas including equality and inclusion

·         Writing and delivering engaging papers, articles, talks and presentation and widely disseminating findings and recommendations

Recent examples  of research work with black communitie include:

Geographies of Black Protest (GBP): Working with Historian and supervisor for this thesis, Dr Karen Salt (UoN), specifically in the UK, St Lucia and Nova Scotia, Canada, the GBP, is a research project explores resistance, resilience and rebellion in black protest movements and aspires to share successful past and present protest strategies with other black activists in other parts of the world.

Slave Trade Legacies (STL)/Legacy Makers (LM): Working with Geographer Dr Susanne Seymour, I have co-written and delivered presentations for national and international conferences and convenings on the Slave Trade Legacies project including: 39^th Annual Conference, Society of Caribbean Studies, 2015; The Royal Geographical Society’s international conference(Decolonising Geographical Knowledges), 2017; and the National Archives and Research Libraries UK (Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities), 2018. The STL project is a case-study in the national Common Cause report, 2018 which interrogates community-academic partnerships in the arts and cultural heritage sector. STL was shortlisted for the heritage category of the Heritage Lottery Awards in 2016 and Blood Sugar, a film produced from the project was shortlisted for the AHRC Research in Film awards in 2018 in the New Beginnings category. It has been shortlisted twice for the University of Nottingham’s Knowledge Exchange and Impact Awards (2016 and 2018) and won the university’s Volunteer Award in 2018. The project now called ‘Legacy Makers’ is in it’s fifth year focussing on researching the local, regional, national and global histories of Darley Abbey.

The Bigger Picture (BP): Working with arts and cultural heritage institutions in Nottingham and partners from Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham, The BP project explores access to and the accessibility of arts and heritage institutions and implications for minority audiences and potential audiences.  Through community engagement and involvement methodologies I have built a team of BAME community researchers who have devised and employed their own research project and tools to use with communities and BME centres and groups. I worked with the community researchers to write up their findings and recommendations including reflective sessions with community researchers on the research process and their experiences on the project.

Community activist

I have been a volunteer and activist since working for the UKAIDI supplementary school in 1990 (UKAIDI is one of the organisations featured in my thesis).  I have undertaken numerous roles at and for black centres such as Islington African Project.

I have worked deeply with the Black Lives Matter in the UK, which is, of course, fuelled and activated by 400 years of black activism and activists. I have worked with two of the three co-creators of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Alicia Garza and co-creators of BLM UK as well as other UK leaders such as Patrick Vernon who wrote the Foreword for A Place to Call Home report (referenced on the About page) and whose work recently led to highlighting of the ‘Windrush Scandal’ in UK Parliament calling for more support for the Windrush generation and their descendants and the protection of community assets and meeting spaces.

I have worked in partnership with other activists and University of Sussex to co-create the UK’s first scholar-activism conference “Scholar Activism in the 21^st Century (British Library, 2018). I delivered a paper and presentations at this conference. The event was inspired by October Dialogues, Black Lives Matter – Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) first Black Lives Matter conference, which my company, Bright Ideas Nottingham, co-created with the University of Nottingham in 2015. I have also delivered presentations abroad for BLMUK including Public Calling, National Theatre, Oslo (Fritt Ord Foundation and KORO Public Art Norway), and the United Nations World Forum for Democracy, Strasberg in 2018.