Together with Jean Lemba, Jacques founded AFSCS (African French Speaking Community Support) in 2005. At the time, both volunteered supporting their fellow members from the French community in Birmingham with interpretation, reading and responding to letters, attending appointments, making phone calls and anything else that was needed.
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The organisation registered as a charity in 2012, with Jacques now holding the role of Chair of AFSCS. Jacques explains that the language barrier has the biggest impact on members of the French speaking communities in the area, thereby putting them at a major disadvantage, “Because of the language barrier, many people can't access mainstream services, don't understand what is going on, [such as with] the formation around COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccination. So this has been at the heart of the services we have been providing, including the social media studio, where we are doing many campaigns in French around all topics.”

Yaa is the CEO of the Hwupenyu project in Glasgow. The charity provides support for Black ethnic communities in Scotland living with chronic health conditions and aims to address health inequalities that Black ethnic groups face.
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Founded in 2014, the Hwupenyu project directly supports people with a range of health conditions - including Diabetes, HIV+, High Blood Pressure, Mobility issues, Mental Health conditions, and Hepatitis – through providing information and advice.

Hannah is the founder of Young Ladies Club which seeks to raise aspirations in disadvantaged young women to achieve their education and career potential by providing mentoring, confidence building activities and career workshops from positive role models.

The organisation has recently expanded its portfolio to six programmes: three learning programmes, an ambassador programme, a mentoring programme and a crime prevention programme. The mentoring programme is aimed at girls aged 12 to 15 in schools. The focus is on trying to help them build up their self-esteem and confidence.

​One of the most common challenges made to the validity of Black-led, lived experience led and Global Majority led social enterprises and charities in the funding landscape is related to the veracity of our financial management and the strength or resiliency of our revenue models. 

Despite the work that organisations like ours have done over the past few years to elucidate the sector to the reality, both good and bad, facing our organisations with relation to financing, there is still too little publicly available research to de-risk lived experience leaders as a whole and determine with some finality that there is a social investment pipeline in the our communities. 

With that said, we are embarking on a research project to determine the strength of the Pipeline of Black, lived experience and Global Majority led social impact organisations with a view to co-design and develop a social investment funding model that is fit for purpose for the our community. To ensure the success of this research project and the validity of its outcomes we need as many of you as possible to fill in the survey. 

By giving us less than 10 minutes of your time, you will be contributing significantly to the development of a more equitable social investment sector that is well suited to our needs, the types of organisations we build and the future we want to see in our society. We will stop collecting responses at 11:59 pm on April 22nd, 2022.