A room full of tomorrow
Every October we turn towards the past. We say the names, we retell the journeys, we hold up the photographs of those who came before us and made a way where there was none. But on a Thursday evening, 8th October, at the start of this Black History Month, I stood in a room in the City of London and was reminded that Black history is not only something we look back on. It is something we are making, right now, in how we show up and in the young people we choose to stand beside.
The evening was Champions for Change, a charity event for Young Leaders Academy, a school that exists to give young Black African and Caribbean children the confidence, character, opportunities and networks they need to thrive. The room was full of people who had chosen to stand behind these young people. There were reception drinks and canapés, the polite hum of a professional crowd. Underneath all of that, there was something that felt a lot like hope and excitement.
Who they were, and who they are becoming
Two of the young leaders stood up to speak. They told us who they had been before they came to the Academy, and who they had become since.
I won’t try to retell their stories for them. They are theirs, and they told them far better than I could. What stays with me is how they told them. They spoke with a steadiness I did not have at their age. They looked out at a room full of adults and owned the space. And there was joy in it, the kind that comes from being seen for who you are and believed in for who you could be.
It was a pleasure to watch. It was also a quiet kind of proof. When young Black people are given the right space, they do not just survive the world as it is. They begin to imagine and rewrite a different one.
I kept thinking about what it means for a child to hear, early on, that their voice matters. How many of us waited decades to be told that? How many of us are still waiting?
Because of Cleveland ‘Boubacarr’ Wright
I was asked to speak as one of the Champions, about why I support the school. I began with words from For Good, the song from Wicked about the people who pass through our lives and leave us altered.
….Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better? But because I knew you I have been changed for good…’
That is how I feel about Cleve.
Not only did he show me a love I’d not experienced before, and one I won’t experience again (it was unique because of who we were together), he also proudly embraced his ancestral history and wanted to ensure that the next generation of young Black adults had the opportunities he was fortunate to experience.
Because of Cleve, I continue to support the Young Leaders Academy in his name. Every year I get to watch his legacy grow, not as a plaque or picture on a wall but as a living thing: in the children who walk through those doors, in the confidence they carry out of them, in the futures they go on to build. Being part of that is one of the great privileges of my life.
In my talk I shared an African proverb: until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. History, and the stories we tell about who matters, are shaped by whoever holds the pen. When someone else holds it, our experiences can be misunderstood, made smaller, or left out altogether.
As a Black woman living without children, I know what it is to have assumptions made about my life before I have had the chance to speak. Finding my voice is what allowed me to challenge those assumptions, and to recognise that my story has value. When we tell our own stories, we shape how we are seen, and we widen what others believe is possible.
That is what I see the Young Leaders Academy doing. It is putting the pen into young hands. And everyone deserves the chance to hold it and write the story they wish to be told.
None of this happens by accident. I want to acknowledge the Academy’s directors, Andrew Muhammad, David Okoro, Kirsty Jones and Mark Muhammad, for the vision it took to start this school and the commitment it takes to keep it growing. My thanks, too, to the trustees, Leonard Philip (Chair), Sharon Thomas, Michael Amaning and Yomi Akinsanya, and to the Academy’s patron, Shaun Wallace, for the care and stewardship they bring. What they have built together is more than a programme. It is a place where young Black people are seen, stretched and believed in, and where a legacy like Cleve’s can keep on living.
The children I did not have, and the children I can stand behind
I live with the unrealised dream of motherhood. I know the particular ache of rooms full of children, of milestones I will not mark, of a word that was never mine to answer to. That grief has not gone anywhere. I have learned to carry it differently, but I still carry it.
And yet, watching those two young people speak, I felt something tender and unexpected. A kind of pride that had nowhere obvious to go and went there anyway.
I am not their mother. I would never claim that. But I have come to believe that nurturing is bigger than biology. There are many ways to pour into a young life: to make room for it, to fund its possibilities, to show up, to say I see you, and I am in your corner. Our communities have always known this. The aunties who were not aunties. The neighbors who fed whoever was at the table. The elders who raised the village’s children as if they were their own.
Being a Champion lets me take part in that tradition. In a small, indirect way, I get to help parent a generation. It does not replace what I lost. It does not have to. It simply gives my love somewhere to land.
Looking back to move forward
There is a West African idea, Sankofa, often shown as a bird looking back over its shoulder while its feet face forward. It teaches that we must go back and fetch what we have forgotten in order to move ahead.
That is what I believe Black History Month asks of us. We look back not out of nostalgia, but for direction. Our ancestors’ history is a map. It shows us what was survived, what was built, and what was refused. It tells our young people that they come from somewhere, and that they are not starting from nothing.
But a map is only useful if someone carries it forward. That is where those two young leaders come in, and the children who will follow them through the Academy’s doors. They are not only inheriting Black history. They are writing the next chapter. And those of us who stand behind them? We get to be the riverbank. One of the young leaders described us, the supporters, in just that way: a riverbank they can draw from as they flow on towards wherever they are going. I can think of no better place to stand.
I attended the Champions for Change event thinking about Cleve, about the stories we are finally learning to write ourselves, and about the children I never had. I also thought about the children I can still stand behind, and I left feeling, in the truest sense, changed for good.
If you would like to find out more about the Young Leaders Academy or becoming a Champion for Change, visit wylauk.com. Please also spread the word about this amazing work.
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