Hi all, welcome to our platform and to everyone who has supported our journey so far, thank you so much! It has definitely been a huge learning experience over the past few months and I am so grateful for all the amazing people  I’ve had the opportunity to work with. 

Our journey began last year in May, where we started co-designing our pilot community action programme with a group of inspiring young women who supported us in shaping the very foundations on which we’re built on. We were part of the Year Here incubator, who supported us to better understand how we could actually make this idea into a reality! 

We noticed a huge gap in the lack of a platform that existed for young women of colour to talk about issues that impact them on a day to day basis within their community and them wanting to see more role models that looked like them. During our focus groups with the women, they continuously mentioned not knowing how to talk about those issues and how they could truly make an impact in tackling those issues within their communities. They were keen to learn, grow and make a change. 

Alongside that passion, we also noticed that there was a need to want to learn essential skills during this process, such as communication, presentation and increasing their self-belief to talk about these very topics. As the lockdown had started easing then, we were really excited to be launching this face to face but we instead found ourselves adapting our model as quickly as we could to continue supporting the young women that we were working with. 

This platform is the beginning of a journey to create more meaningful conversations and change around issues that are impacting young people of colour across communities. It’s a space to bring these young minds together to initiate that change and to begin a journey of self-discovery in the process. We have and still are in the process of offering accessible resources, spaces to discuss, debate and connect a community of inspiring changemakers and leaders. 

Voices of Colour was established with a vision of empowering underrepresented changemakers who are unafraid to voice their vision for a better world, support them to have agency to transform their communities, and help them to create long-lasting change. Their voices matter, their experiences matter and their representation matters more than ever.

We cannot wait to share our journey with you… 

Thank you and stay safe! 

Indy