“Waking up to the text message I’d dreaded at 6am on the morning of Saturday 23rd March 2024 is something will live in my memory for a long time.
We’d known Richards prognosis for many months of course and in the end it was a blessing that he didn’t have to suffer anymore as the cancer had taken hold.
It was still extremely traumatic as I had geared up the media for some time so we could do justice to his status and legacy when the end came
Pressing send to action the press release and alerts to everyone that needed to know outside of close family and friends I then turned my phone off, went for a long walk then disappeared into the pub to break my pledge of sobriety. We were close and I didn’t want to face the tsunami of media interest that was incoming..
I first met Richard and Gloria Taylor at Lambeth town Hall in 2004. It was a networking event for charities and people looking to supportcharities working in the borough to meet and exchange ideas
I recognised Richard from all the media coverage the tragedy of Damilola had recieved in 2000 and as I’d been a postman some years earlier working the same area the terrible occurrence had happened in I felt a strong connection
Now I was a fairly successful marketer having been voted UK Marketing society new product category marketer of the year at one stage it was my marketing skills as well as formative years as a youth worker I wanted to put to good use
Richard was a character and that’s putting it lightly. Over the years we’d have our disagreements but generally as we worked closer amd closer we became like family
After I had agreed to work pro bono developing assets for the Damilola Taylor Trust I helped with communication strategies initially while his original management team worked on and access to health care and medicine training with King’s college hospital. Damilola had dreamed of being a Doctor and so this was where initially the DTT focused it’s attentions
Then after a bit of turmoil between Richard and his management team in 2007 they parted company and I agreed to step in as an interim CEO
The first major project i found myself managing with “The peoples march against knife crime” a collaboration between several families who lost their children in 2008 most notably Brooke Kinsella who’d lost her brother Ben that year sadly
Estimates were that around 20,000 people joined two marches from North & South London that met at Eros picadilly circus before converging on Hyde Park where a peace rally was staged
It was shortly before the March that Richards battle with prostate cancer had started in fact he had an operation a couple of weeks before setting out from Kennington Park and despite our pleas that he took the tube and met us at Hyde park he demanded to March the whole route alongside over 50 fellow victim families who’d come from around the uk to take part
Richard always wanted the DTT to focus on mentoring and supporting disadvantaged young people with better life chances.
This is still the work the Damilola Taylor Trust is most focused on and in the last 8 years over 500 young people from South London Boroughs have been mentored with life skills and work ready training
My work with the DTT very much focused on designing communications programmes that could level up the media headlines London was exposed to due the negative actions of a minority. When we were researching how we could make the biggest difference when I stepped in as CEO this was the area we identified that we wanted to most explore
The Spirit of London awards was staged for the first time in 2009 at the Alexandra Palace with X Factor winner Alexander Burke and BGT runner up Diversity among the supporting acts
We went on to stage it 4 years in succession raising over £750k from private sector sponsors so that over 15,000 young people could recieve free tickets for the shows and an alumni of 120 young people could be developed
The Indigo O2 was 2010 venue then in 2011 we rocked up at the Royal Albert Hall. 2012 saw a team of under 21 year old event team take on the O2 Arena the biggest indoor venue in the country
Richard absolutely loved the pomp amd ceremony in way we staged the events to the point they became known as “The community youth Oscar’s” Donning his tux he adored getting on stage to say a few words each year
Young Londoners were getting a bad rap and our ambition was “Big problems need big solutions. Go large or go home” was our motto
The 2012 event was the biggest live youth awards show ever staged in the UK
The alumni development programme revolved around a school roadshow the youngsters had devised themselves the entire process from marketing free to schools to producing and managing done by the alumni themselves
Graham Norton chat show style was how they described it. The schools were asked to provide couple of small sofas to be set up in front of school assembly then a young presenter would interview 5/6 of the alumni whod speak about their experience on the red carpet at the event amd all important the life choices they made that saw them arrive there.
Jamal Edwards was one of our most noted alumni speakers in fact legend has it that he did his first ever public speaking gig at a SOLA school roadshow show and was just so humble and shy he had to hide in the boys toilets to escape the attention of lots of girl pupils who were keen to meet him
Jamal was a huge influence on SOLA. We would meet with him and his Sbtv team in planning stages sat on scatter cushions at their little office in Camden. One day his friend who had been sleeping on his sofa in between busking sessions came along. Nice kid called Ed Sheeran!
Richard would attend the school roadshows occasionally and was always literally gobsmacked at how professionally the kids pulled these events together with next to no budget
In early 2013 following one of the school road shows one of our youngest alumni lost his best friend to knife crime and he asked us to gather the alumni together to discuss solutions to the violence epidemic in our poorest communities.
A couple of weeks later over 50 young people from all 4 corners of London were gathered in the Damilola Taylor Trust tiny office in Camberwell south London and a fresh leg of the journey had begun
The Awards were wrapped in cotton wool and a project called ONE BIG COMMUNITY (1BC) took off powered by the alumni
In the fullness of time the full story will be told but with Richards blessing i stepped away from the DTT role at this stage and took on a support role helping the 1bc team in their quest to change the narrative around the violence impacting their communities
By 2015 we had staged some of the most authentic youth led events ever staged in London and the big driver was trauma and the stories of young people, families and communities living with its impact day in day out. The reality underpinning the youth violence label which was becoming a toxic narrative all on its own doing more harm than good in the eyes of the young people
At this stage we found ourselves talking to a group of MP’s including Deptford Labour MP Vicky Foxcroft – Vicky had lost a number of her young constituents in her first year of becoming an MP and was particularly motivated to look at solutions
It was determined that our young people would meet with a handful of Labour party opposition MP’s for a briefing session before the MP’s went into the commons and debated youth violence for the first time in history
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gary-trowsdale/the-violence-debate_b_9415380.html
I kept Richard up to speed with all events of course and when I got the call to help set up an all party commission into root causes Youth violence off the back of the debate it’s fair to say he was pleased as punch
Everything I did I did under the auspices of the DTT and the journey was ongoing in my eyes from the first time Richard and I had discussed the root causal factors in the tragedy of his son which were the poverty & inequalities in the Peckham area the family had moved into
The all party parliamentary commission followed the evidence from Scotland where the scottish VRU had decreased knife crime incidents by 60% between 2006 and 2016 and the extremely driven team we assembled worked diligently to guarantee high level impact. I had built a team outside Parliament of top professionals and academics all prepared to work pro bono in order to be involved in a parliamentary commission like no other.
The team visited Scotland and took the learnings back into parliament and we formed a project plan that would see the countries foremost public health experts give evidence in front of our Commissioner MP’s. Myself and Richard would meet once a fortnight so I could update him on what we were getting up to and progress being made
These meetings would usually coincide with him coming into town for hospital appointments as his long battle to tackle his prostate issue was heating up
The all party commission delivered our interim report in the spring of 2018 with a heavily attended launch event in the house of commons. As befitted my marketing and comms background i had brought the London evening standard in as a media campaign partner and so it came to pass that on the day of the interim launch with its top line recommendation that the rest of the UK followed Scotland in adopting public health strategies and the VRU model the front page of the Paper carried the headline “Violent London A New Way Forward”
A few weeks later the Mayor of London would declare that London was to launch its own VRU then at the Tory party conference the then home secretary announced that the Government was setting up a home office unit to start treating violence as a disease based on the successful Scottish model
To commemorate this success I arranged for the founders of the Scottish VRU John Carnochan and Karyn Mcklusky along with current Director Niven Rennie to join forces with the DTT for an 18th anniversary lecture which Vicky Foxcroft the commission chair and Richard himself would speak at.
Unbeknown to many in the audience that night they were witnessing the birth of the Hope Collective.
As the academics and our secretariat UK Youth did the drafting and the numbers for the final report i busied myself preparing for the forthcoming 20th anniversary in 2020 and how to maximise its impact positively
We set out a plan to stage events based on young people’s hopes for the future right across the UK. Dami had written a short essay about his hope for the world shortly before the tragedy and this was the inspiration
We announced our plans on the night of the 19th anniversary with a whole range of partners in the Ritzy cinema Brixton. Among those geared to support were the Scottish and new London VRU
Little did we realise of course that creeping up on the horizon was a new super bug called Covid!
Having virtually 18 months wiped out where engaging young people physically was impossible was of course a terrible blow but we used the time progressively by staging online planning meetings which were attended by an eclectic mix of organisations and individuals including the Professional Footballers association whose Chair was Gordon Taylor
Gordon’s first meeting on line with Richard was hilarious when Richard told him they must be brothers but definitely from another mother!
Most relevantly we had many of the emerging VRU set ups joining our calls from across the UK
I went to meet the nstional citizens service (NCS) where they agreed to second their top event planners to the newly formed Hope Collective and we set out a plan to create a youth empowerment event we called a Hope Hack
Our founder partners such as UK Youth, OnSide Zones and Rio Ferdinand Foundation also pitched in and by the time we staged the first Hope Hack in June 2021 in partnership with the London VRU we were building huge momentum with the legacy campaign
We had formed a youth management group made up of young people from all over the UK including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They called our pilot project “Changing the conversation” because as they pointed out eloquently at the online launch “We are tired of being blamed for social ills manifesting out of poverty & inequalities it’s time to talk about real solutions to the adult establishment terrain we are forced to navigate”
Last week we staged our 38th Hope Hack across the UK when the Lancashire VRU and our team descended on Chorley
When we pitch up at Forest Bank prison in May with the Manchester VRU team, we will have engaged almost 4,000 young people in the conversation about what a fairer society could look like and we are joining forces with leading economic think tank National Institute of economic & Social research (INEAS) to put all the data and insights to best use possible in a joint project looking at the benefits to society of levelling up our poorest communities
As we herald the first anniversary of Ruchards death I think he would be proud of what is now his legacy as much as Damilolas. He said on visiting the stairwell in Peckham where Damilola had died that he was deeply shocked at the level of poverty he found all around him in the area
Much has changed and much hasn’t. Many areas of London and the rest of the UK have seen huge investment in gentrification but extremely deep pockets of poverty exist in the shadow of the gentrified areas while inequalities have sadly sky rocketed
There in a nutshell is the biggest causal factor underpinning the escalated nature of crime and violence in London
When Damilola died it was front page news all over the world. London had very recently elected a Mayor and policing powers were devolved to City Hall. In the last 25 years the stats and data around violence impacting young lives are inescapable
The Damilola Taylor Trust has done more to try and influence authentic change than many may have realised and thats why we are now bringing the legacy story to light to honour Richards memory. His legacy continues to fight for change!
So what now for the immediate future?
Well to begin with to help shape the Damilola Taylor Trust with a 5 year plan towards 2030 when Damilola would have been 40 years old my great friend and colleague on the all party parliamentary commission Dr Leroy Logan MBE has joined the trustee board and is chairing the 25th anniversary planning committee
Richards last wishes and demands of us were that the DTT should use the historic milestone to try and build a bridge of trust between the police and young people and this is what we intend to do
The Hope Collective are working with the 23 strong VRU network across the UK to create a 10 day “Festival of hope” from the 27th November (anniversary of tragedy) to 7th December (Damilolas heavenly birthday) and we are creating an event tool kit to share across entire UK youth sector where local events can be created that encourage participation between police and young people. The National police cadets association will be a support partner
On the 7th December Southwark council are working with the DTT on a commemorative area in Peckham square to be unveiled and then on December 8th the long awaited return of The Spirit of london awards night
Richard was a huge presence and it was my privilege to share almost 20 years working with him. In our last conversation he asked me what my biggest regret was and I told him truthfully it was that in order to push forward with seeking solutions to the violence we had needed to moth ball the awards in 2013
Bring them back, he said, London needs their light more than ever
Gary Trowsdale 