Necessary Rebels

In this episode we talk to Meera Bhogal who runs healthy eating and wellbeing classes for menopausal women of South Asian descent, as well as healthy eating brand Made from Scratch. When Meera started to develop symptoms of menopause at the age of 40, she didn’t know where to turn for advice. She’s since implemented free menopause training to support women in the workplace and is committed to opening up the conversation about menopause in South Asian communities. 'I’ve often been told that menopause is a myth and that it is a white person’s disease. I have no idea where this comes from but I ask myself whether this is because the people shouting about menopause are not looking like them?'

Meet Swiss, best known as a member of BRIT and MOBO award-winning group So Solid Crew, who rose to fame in the early 2000s. And now most recently, the  creator of Black Pound Day.  BPD first launched in the wake of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement on June 27 2020 and takes place on the first Saturday of every month. It encourages the community to buy from Black-owned businesses and services for the day. 'Black Pound Day is a positive initiative that is helping rebalance the discrimination that we face as Black people.' Are you buying Black? 

You can find out more about BPD here. 

#BlackPoundDay 

In this episode we sit down with Tashan Jordan to talk about mental health, being released from QPR football academy and racism faced on the job. 

Yomi is a poet, playwright, facilitator, and recipient of the 2019 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. He is known by the public thanks to his acclaimed one-man show titled COAT, which has been performed at Brighton festival and the Last Word festival, among other spaces. He also curates an online blog platform for fathers and guardians called ‘Daddy Diaries’.  In this episode we speak to Yomi about all things 'Manorism' which is also the name of his poetry collection due out Oct. 2022. There are some real emotional bits here so hang on to your seat.

In our first episode back we talk with Esther, a social worker and team manager with experience in working in child protection, and children's safeguarding about Child Q, as she is called, a 15 year old girl who was made to remove her clothing, underwear and a sanitary pad, spread her buttocks and cough when her teachers accused her of smelling of cannabis. After they failed to find drugs on her, Metropolitan police officers were called into the school to conduct a strip search .  Let us be clear - this was not a strip search! It was assault and we are outraged! 

If you are a professional working with young black girls consider what this story is telling other young black girls about how they should feel about those in authority who should be there to protect them. 

Have you heard of 'farming'? We hadn't. Do a search and you'll see it won’t quickly turn up.  It's the practice of private fostering or adoption outside of the local authority.  It  gained notoriety in response to a growing population of African student families taking up temporary residence at British universities in the mid-1950s. On this week's episode Tori Awani shares what it was like being fostered by a white family and the impact it had on her life and now her daughters life.  To find out more about Farming watch The Last Tree. 

On this weeks episode we talk to my friend Louis Howell about his work in the public and private sector on Diversity and Inclusion. We hear him share important life lessons from his childhood and how Black men MUST show up for Black women. 

Louis co-runs Revolution Hive, a social enterprise equipping young people for life through personal development and social responsibility programmes. His consultancy, 7PK, helps organisations improve their approaches to Youth and Community Development, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Social Mobility. He is a Trustee for two charities and a proud member of the 100 Black Men of London. 

In this episode, we have the incomparable Colin Grant. He takes us on a journey through the early days of his career.  Shared emotional stories of some of the people in his books. Sit back and relax. Trust me when I say you are in good company here. 

Colin is an author of five books. They include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016.

 As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word. Colin is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing.

Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.

You can find Colin on Twitter and Insta. 

Josh is the creator and host of Busy Being Black (podcast) and Head of Communications for UK Black Pride. On this episode Josh talks to us about the ways in which he navigates the world as Queer and Black. He drops a million other gems too!