We helped the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust curate a discussion on fairness, justice and equal rights with The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and young leaders from across the Commonwealth.
The challenge
In the summer of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement gathered pace, the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust was running a weekly series of youth-led discussions on injustice, feeding into its wider work on historic injustice and shaping the Trust’s future direction. A session of this profile carries obvious risk. Get the framing wrong and it becomes a photo opportunity, so the Trust needed the conversation shaped around substance and the right voices in the room.
Our approach
We worked with the Trust to curate the discussion, helping shape the themes and the questions that would move it beyond statements of support towards something practical. The panel brought together The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, President and Vice-President of the Trust, alongside Chrisann Jarrett of We Belong, Alicia Wallace of Equality Bahamas, Abdullahi Alim of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers network, and our founder Mike Omoniyi. The conversation covered unconscious bias, the work of acknowledging the past, and what meaningful allyship actually requires of people once the posting stops.
The outcome
Covered worldwide after distribution by the Press Association and Associated Press, running on ITV News, NBC, CNN, Global News, Yahoo, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and hundreds of outlets across the Commonwealth
A session the Duchess described as energising and inspiring, which set the terms of a national argument about the Commonwealth’s colonial past for days afterwards
Themes carried into the Trust’s ongoing work on historic injustice
“After pressing send online, people need to roll up their sleeves and do the work.”
Mike Omoniyi, Founder & CEO
