Race Forward Pod

In this episode, Lydiah Igweh talks to Melanie Eusebe who shares insights about using data to foster diversity and inclusion.

Melanie Eusebe is the founder of the Black British Business Awards (BBBAwards) and a Director of Strategy and Consulting at Accenture. Melanie is also a professor in leadership and management at a leading business school and has her own online financial wellness community.

Alongside her leading role in the BBBAwards, Melanie was Executive Producer for the Women of the World (WoW) Festival, a global gender equality festival involving over two million women from 50 cities on five continents. Given the Queen’s honours for her contributions, Melanie has been profiled as one of the most influential women in business and the creative industries in the UK.

Episode 23 brings a conversation between Lydiah Igweh and Ivié Itoje about achieving racial awareness & diversity and breaking barriers to inclusion and racist behaviours through a measured approach. 

Ivié is the Anti-Racism Expert at Flair Impact, a people analytics company that helps organisations measure and build anti-racist cultures, founded on the footrail of the Black Lives Matter campaigns and following the murder of George Floyd.

Ivié started as a student activist, challenging policy, discrimination courses on campus. She went on to study law with great interest in race theory.

Her experience includes working with the Migrant law centre, amplifying the marginalised voices and has been at the frontlines fighting for racial and social justice, focusing on how race and gender interject.

Now she champions intentional inclusion in workplaces, helping organisations use data to build informed and sustainable change towards DE&I goals.

In this episode, Lydiah Igweh talks to Nzinga Orgill, who shares insights on breaking racial stereotyping and achieving sustainable DEI in the workplace.

Nzinga Orgill is the Founder & CEO of RaCExpert Limited.

She is an anti-racism strategist and diversity, equality & Inclusion consultant. Nzinga is a transformational change leader in the innovation, automation and digitisation spaces. As an advocate of social justice, Nzinga believes in giving everyone the support, sponsorship and opportunity to move forward and progress. In her words, being able to “do what we say, and say what we do” is where progress can be achieved in moving things forward in the DE&I space.

In this episode, Deloitte's Richard Odufisan shares insights on the importance of celebrating multi-racial and multi-cultural history. Richard shares the innovative initiatives and ways to achieve a cohesive multi-racial workforce. He shares how to "listen" to your employees to learn the challenges they face as a specific race and create allyship in the workplace and community. He delves deeper into how you can collaboratively drive positive change to achieve DEI goals while constantly learning and improving as an organisation. And most importantly, he shares practical insights on how to continually measure organisational progress towards achieving inclusive workplaces for all races, especially for black employees. 

For Richard, Black History is about celebrating culture, background and identity and recognising the incredible contributions that black people have made across the world. 

About Richard, 

Richard is a Manager in the Deloitte Consulting Practice and a leader in the firm's Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing agenda, holding multiple roles as an Inclusion Lead, Mental Health Champion and Wellbeing Champion. He has coordinated and supported numerous cross-firm and external initiatives to drive the conversation and build greater organisational cultural change. As a member of a firmwide Steering Group, he is working with the firm's leadership to design and implement Deloitte's Black Action Plan. He is also the co-chair of the firm's Black Network, the newest of Deloitte's twelve Diversity Networks. At the heart of his message is the aim that through diversity and inclusion, we celebrate our differences, and no one gets left behind or forgotten.

In this episode, Jenny shares her strategies for inclusive leadership and the importance of equity in creating an organisation that empowers and inspires employees to be their authentic selves, to have a sense of belonging. 

She shares her experiences of inequality, especially racism, and how she overcame adversity in her early career, including creating solutions to the challenges she faced.  

About Jenny Garrett

Jenny is an award-winning Career Coach, Leadership Trainer, Speaker & Author. Using her unique skills around gender balance, leadership, inclusion and self-improvement Jenny works with individuals and organisations to achieve career and life-changing results. 

She has over 4,000 coaching hours under her belt, has designed and delivered leadership programmes to support the advancement of ethnically diverse leaders, and has reached an audience of over 30,000 through her speaking engagements. 

Jenny created the first-ever Diverse Executive Coach Directory and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s 2021 New Year Honours list for services to Entrepreneurship and Women in Business. 

In this episode of the Race Forward Pod with Lydiah Igweh and Tiger de Souza, Tiger shares his love for working at the National Trust to create a culture that values difference, includes everyone, and recognises the strength that comes from diversity. 

He provides insights into the importance of strategies and initiatives focused on inclusion as a driver for effective employee engagement, and in developing inclusive work environments. 

He has had a wide-ranging career in the non-profit sector and worked at the Royal Institution for Chartered Surveyors, NSPCC and England Netball.  

Tiger is a passionate advocate of the power and creativity of youth, after spending five years in his early career being motivated and challenged by a host of brilliant young people at Vinspired.

He has been a trustee of both Volunteering England and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and is currently a Trustee for the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations. 

Tiger was awarded an MBE for volunteering services, including during the pandemic on the 2020 New Year's Honours List.

Rashford, Sancho, and Saka suffered racist abuse after England lost the penalty shootout against Italy in Euro 2020. Episode 17 features former professional footballer Michael Duberry. Michael talks about tackling racism in football and shares his thoughts on the role of clubs, society and social media platforms in creating an anti-racist culture and a positive experience for all.

Michael had a 20-year playing career when the average football career is only 8 years. He made a staggering 500 appearances for clubs including Chelsea, Leeds United, Stoke City and Reading, to name but a few. After retiring from elite football, Michael set up Made Leaders, his own coaching company, and has forged a new career as an executive coach, facilitator and keynote speaker, specialising in Elite Performance.

Building synergies between internal and external DE&I efforts is a challenge faced by many organisations. In this episode 16, Asif Sadiq MBE, Senior Vice President of E&I International at Warner Media, explains the importance of transformation from DE&I to belonging to create future workplaces.

Asif has a long and rich career in the DE&I space, with previous senior executive roles at Adidas, The Telegraph, and EY Financial Services. He is listed as one of the most Influential Global D&I Leaders by Hive Learning, the CIPD’s Top 20 Power List, and was honoured with an MBE in 2017 by the Queen.