TOP 8 - OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO COMMUNITIES 2018
ADE HASSAN MBE
Ade Hassan is the creator and founder of Nubian Skin, a nude bra and skin tone hosiery brand for women of colour. Since its launch in late 2014, Nubian Skin has been featured in every major fashion magazine; supplied the wardrobes of major productions in the West End; won the Great British Entrepreneur Award for Fashion in 2015; and provided the intimates for the Beyoncé Formation Tour in 2016. In 2017, Hassan received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for the impact she has made on the fashion industry.
DOREEN LAWRENCE OBE
When Doreen Lawrence’s son Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, she began a fight to bring the institutional racism of the Metropolitan Police to the limelight. To this day, she continues to campaign for the victims of racist crimes. She founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and also sits on various panels across the UK. In 2003, she was awarded an OBE for services to community relations, and in 2013, she was appointed Baroness, and sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords as a working peer.
HARUN KHAN
Harun Khan is Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the first second-generation Muslim to be elected into the leadership. The MCB serves to empower the Muslim community to contribute towards achieving a cohesive, just and successful British society. Khan has volunteered with the MCB since he was a teenager, and founded the Eid celebrations in London’s Trafalgar Square in partnership with the Mayor of London and attended by up to 20,000 visitors.
JASVINDER SANGHERA CBE
Jasvinder Sanghera is the founder of Karma Nirvana, an award-winning charity that supports both men and women affected by honour based abuse and forced marriages. At 14 Sanghera ran away from home rather than suffer a forced marriage and was determined that her own children would be in control of their own lives. Her work is recognised as being pivotal to the creation of a specific UK forced marriage criminal offence in 2014. Her bestselling memoir Shame was described in the House of Lords as a ‘political weapon’ and Prime Minister David Cameron stated that her work ‘turned my head on the issue of forced marriage’.
LEON LOPEZ
Leon Lopez is a filmmaker and actor. Responding to the lack of diversity in the film and television industry, Lopez began Brown Boy Productions. He uses his filmmaking to talk about issues within society that he feels are neglected by mainstream media. His most recent film ‘Almost Saw The Sunshine’, is about violence towards Trans women of colour.
PAUL REID
Paul Reid is Director at the Black Cultural Archives, home to the UK’s first permanent collection of Black cultural heritage. Reid has a long history of working at community level. He was Vice Chair for Lambeth’s Commission into Gang and Gun Crime and a Founder Member of New Initiatives Youth and Community Association, a Charity that specialises in delivering African-Centred rites of passage programmes that engage young people and their families in transition processes.
PAULETTE SIMPSON
Paulette Simpson is the executive director of The Voice, the only British national black weekly newspaper. She is also Executive of corporate affairs and public policy at Jamaica National’s (JN) representative office in the UK.
DR YVONNE THOMPSON CBE
Yvonne Thompson is managing director of the marketing and PR company ASAP Communications, a former director of Choice FM radio, and president of the European Federation of Black Women Business Owners. Her work has had a particular focus on women-owned businesses as well as on global diversity and gender equality. Thompson has been described as Britain’s first black self-made woman millionaire. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honour List in 2003 for her services to women, small business and minorities.