Leaders in Community is a youth-led charity run by a group of active local young people in Tower Hamlets and wider East London. Currently on ARE’s Building Ethnic Diversity in the Youth Employability Sector, they are improving employment outcomes for young people from Black, Asian and Mixed heritage communities. We interviewed one its founders, Syed Uddin, for South Asian Heritage Month. Read more below!
What motivated you to establish Leaders in the Community (LiC), and what do you love about the work that you do?
My name is Syed Uddin and I’m one of the founding members of Leaders in Community (LIC). I was 19 years old back in 2006 when Leaders in Community started. I felt that we wanted to be, as young people at that time, decision-makers.
We wanted to cut out the middlemen so to speak. We thought we had great ideas that would really benefit our peers, particularly those from ethnic minority and mixed heritage backgrounds.
Each of the founding members of Leaders in Community probably had their own personal motivations for it. But I think one of the things that united us was that we wanted to create a space that was for all young people.
There was a disconnect between me and my peers from Bangladeshi backgrounds, and people of an older generation. I think we were a lot more connected to London and growing up here in this country. We just felt like the older decision-makers at the time didn’t really understand our needs.
There were a lot of barriers in terms of being able to express our needs and the changes we wanted to see happen. We felt that change was happening at too slow a pace. This is one reason why we set up Leaders in Community… so that we could have a little bit more control over providing the kind of support that we knew our peers needed at that time.
What have some of the challenges been in leading your organisation?
Unfortunately, Tower Hamlets is one of the most deprived boroughs in the whole country…it ranks very highly on the index for multiple deprivation. It’s that specific ward that we operate in.
We’re still experiencing high levels of poverty and deprivation in this area, but it’s a weird juxtaposition now between very rich areas within Tower Hamlets itself, not least the Canary Wharf area.
We neighbour the City of London and Stratford, and the Olympic legacy and all the opportunities that came with that are a stark reminder of the sudden changes we’ve seen.
People are still trying to improve their quality of life though, and I feel like their goalposts have shifted a little bit.
When I was younger most people didn’t complete school. You know, all my friends’ brothers went into the restaurant trade just to do manual labour. Essentially, they lived all over the UK working six days a week for some sort of employment.”
Syed Uddin, Leaders in Community
But, we’ve kind of we broken that cycle now. My generation started performing better academically.
However, in terms of the current climate we’re still going through a cost-of-living crisis as well. That is impacting families and young people especially people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds who have always struggled historically financially.
I feel like it’s set a lot of families and young people back years.
People are finally exploring new kinds of paid opportunities, and suddenly their pockets feel light again even though they’re earning income from employment. The number of people that have to use our local food banks and our food co-op has gone up.
Another challenge as an organisation is fundraising.
This pot of money just seems to be getting smaller and smaller and having to be shared out amongst a much larger group of other charities (that are all doing fantastic work by the way). So there’s less money to go around and less support available. So that’s a challenge. That’s always a challenge. On the flip side, we’re growing as an organisation as well. I think our services are recognised at a national level. Certainly across London partners recognise what we bring to the table. I think our work kind of speaks for itself. I’m really proud of what we do. We’re able to expand our team.
How has LIC supported the South Asian community in the Tower Hamlets over the years?
On the whole, people from South Asian heritage backgrounds are breaking into new sectors, particularly the public sector. More are becoming civil servants working for local authorities and housing providers etc.
But there are still so many sectors where we are very much underrepresented, largely because our young people and our communities are completely unaware of the opportunities that are out there, that surround them in East London, and that are available to them.
Our communities don’t have insight into these different sectors.
There’s no one we can speak to and say, “Hey, what’s your job? Oh, is that what you do? Are you working in the creative sector? You work in the finance sector. You do that in construction. I didn’t know that was part of construction. What on earth? How much do you make?”
Along with other organisations in London and England, we’re showing young people from different backgrounds that they can occupy positions of authority.
We help and support young people to dismantle the internal and external barriers to education, employment and entrepreneurship. We offer a range of governance, careers, work experience, paid work placements and personal development programmes and events to address this. We are fortunate to be working with some fantastic partners and big name corporates to deliver this.
There’re lots of young people that have a South Asian heritage working with us and sometimes they find the representation is lacking. But we want all young people to know that they can affect and impact change.
We tell young people “in fact, you’re very important. You’re far more important than you realise you are. Let’s help you realise your power and your potential and your worth.”
And because we are now an organisation, we have this credibility. We’ve been around for a long time. We’ve built up some fantastic partnerships. We’re communicating to employers whose values align with our mission statement. And you know, we want them to tap into this rich talent pool of local young people, particularly those from Black, Asian and mixed heritage backgrounds in Tower Hamlets.
We’re dispelling myths where we come across them, like when they’re told “this sector is not for you. You know, this sector doesn’t really pay well. This sector only provides this kind of job.” Okay, let’s talk about that. Let’s actually connect and introduce you to somebody that is from that world.
And before I forget, all the people that work at LIC are alumni: amazing young people that make decisions on how the charity should be run and who it should be run for and how to reach out and support the communities that we serve. We occupy a position of power in the community now and we have that relatability to everybody of all ages (or so I like to think).
Like I said previously, people from underrepresented backgrounds are now securing jobs that they wouldn’t have really secured when I first started out when we first started Leaders in Community, but we’ve got a long way to go to level that playing field to ensure that opportunities are a lot more kind of diverse and actually inclusive.
Authors: Payal Bhavsar & Syed Uddin, Founder of Leaders in Community
