Date & Time
3:00pm, 8 December 2020 - 4:30pm, 8 December 2020Location
About the event
How can the Commonwealth be a positive force for change? Join young leaders from across the Commonwealth as they share their vision for the Commonwealth and use examples from their own lives and work to inspire advocacy and action for change.
The destiny of the Commonwealth is in the hands of the next generation. Of the 2.4 billion Commonwealth citizens, over 60% are under 30. Not only are young people the majority, they are taking action on the most pressing issues of our time—from gender equality to racial justice and climate change.
We will explore young people’s perspectives on the Commonwealth’s complex past. What big lessons have been learned, especially from recent activism around racial justice and climate change? How can Commonwealth institutions support youth movements that are pushing for change and help them to do and deliver more?
In collaboration with the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust and the Commonwealth Youth Council, the third event in the Commonwealth Foundation’s Critical Conversations event series puts young leaders’ views and desires at the heart of discussions about the Commonwealth’s legacy, and more importantly its future.
We’re asking young people to come to this conversation with their ideas about what is important, what must change and what support they need to lead the Commonwealth into the future.
This event has taken place. You can watch it here:
Guests
Alicia A. Wallace is a queer Black feminist, gender expert, and research consultant. She is the Director of Equality Bahamas which promotes women’s and LGBTQ+ rights as human rights. Her work includes campaign development, the design and coordination of monthly event series Women’s Wednesdays, and disaster management. She is a Steering Committee member of the Feminist Alliance for Rights (FAR) and Caribbean Advisor for FRIDA the Young Feminist Fund.
Alicia has a weekly column on sociopolitical issues in the Bahamian daily newspaper The Tribune and has published academic papers. She produces The Culture RUSH, a monthly newsletter fusing social justice and pop culture and Scorch which makes feminist academic theory more accessible. Passionate about creating systems and tools to increase civic engagement, she creates safe spaces for critical dialogue and bold imagination. Alicia is interested in issues of identity and power, and co-creating Black feminist futures. She enjoys reading, baking, cycling, gardening, pen palling, and talking to everyone and no one at the same time on Twitter.
Darrion M. Narine was born in Trinidad and Tobago but considers himself to be a global citizen and a social justice advocate. He is currently the Vice-Chairperson for Inclusion and Engagement on the Commonwealth Youth Council, which serves 1.2 billion youth across the globe. He is also the current chair of the task force for the planning of the Commonwealth Youth Forum to be held in Rwanda in 2021. He holds a BSc in Psychology(Special) with a minor in Theatre Arts from the University of the West Indies (U.W.I). He is also currently pursuing a MA in Cultural Studies and is a National Youth Award recipient for Leadership from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.
In addition to this, he is a board member on the Global Coalition for Youth Employment (under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and National Service) and has served as a board member on the Chancellor’s Commission on Governance for the University of the West Indies.
Darrion is also a cultural advocate, performer and entrepreneur. He owns his own business, which deals with performance, public speaking and drama training and networking and leadership development, called Cindon Productions. He also teaches drama at various schools across the country. Furthermore, he is an actor with DCShell Theatre, a singer, poet and writer based in the Caribbean and considers himself to be a regionalist supporting strongly the core principles of CARICOM.
He is also the Director of Planning and Development for the Youth Voice campaign which deals with the promotion of youth political participation across the Caribbean and he is the Founder of R.A.C.E, a campaign that deals with Race and Race relations across the Caribbean and Commonwealth.
Lisa Rapley is a social entrepreneur, global shaper and co-founder of Yuludarla Karulbo. She is passionate about empowering young Indigenous people from across the world through system disruption, capacity and ecosystem building. Lisa is skilled in and embraces systems thinking, Indigenous knowledge systems and co-design principles to solve wicked problems.
Kakembo Galabuzi Brian is the founder of WEYE Clean Energy, a youth-led social enterprise that uses green business as a tool to empower over 700 youth and women to create sustainable and affordable climate solutions. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and an expert certificate in business models for social impact. His project is providing waste to energy cooking and heating solutions to 10 schools, 2 large scale poultry farms and 2 medium-scale industries saving over 1080 trees annually.
He is a recipient of: iF Social Impact Prize in 2017 by iF Design Foundation in Germany; Greenpreneurs Achievement Award 2018 by the Global Green Growth Institute in South Korea; 1st prize in the African Energy Innovation Competition 2019 by the Nigeria Energy Forum in Lagos; The 2020 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year Award and Africa & Europe winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Youth Awards for excellence in development work.
Kavindya is a dean’s fellow at the Stanford School of Education with a background in Learning Experience Design and Anthropology. She is the founder of Tilly; a game-based learning tool focused on developing metacognition, empathy, and critical thinking skills of early learners. Tilli chases the ambitious mission of ensuring that no child grows up to be either a perpetrator or victim of sexual abuse or assault.
In 2014 she co-founded Without Borders; a social enterprise focused on designing innovative learning and training tools for local schools and educators. Without Borders won both the inaugural Queen’s Young Leader’s Award and the Harvard Global Trailblazer’s for their impact within the local education space.
Previously she has worked for Coursera in UX Research and at the MIT Media Lab as a Civic Entertainment Researcher. Her previous engagements have spanned across strategy, development, and the microfinance spaces, working for Ogilvy/IBM, United Nations, the Oxford Microfinance Initiative, MTV/MBC, and Transparency International Sri Lanka.
Emmanuelle Andrews (she/her) is a researcher, campaigner and facilitator working across domestic policy, the arts, academia and activism. She currently works as a Policy & Campaigns Officer at Liberty on issues from facial recognition technology to policing and protest. She has experience in advocacy on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, working previously as the Research & Policy Coordinator at Kaleidoscope Trust where she organised with activists to identify solutions to a legacy experienced by countries across the Commonwealth: the colonial export of homophobic laws, values and sentiment.
Emmanuelle is passionate about public engagement with social justice and works with youth at the South London Gallery as a Researcher-in-Residence, exploring the archive collected in Nigeria and Sierra Leone by a colonial anthropologist in the early 20th century. Committed to black liberation, Emmanuelle is a founding member and the legal officer of the Free Black University, an organisation that utilises the power of education for radical change. She also sits on the board of strategic communications and framing organisation, the Public Interest Research Centre, as well as works with the Runnymede Trust and Voice4Change England on their Reframing Race programme. Emmanuelle read Anthropology and Law at the London School of Economics and holds an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Nondumiso (Noni) Hlophe is Founding Curator and Director of Global Shapers Community: Mbabane Hub, a registered youth-led Non Profit Organisation, in the Kingdom of eSwatini. She holds a Bachelor of Social Science degree with Honours in Political and International Studies from Rhodes University. Impassioned by quality education and gender equality, her work in policy is driven by the desire to see both achieved in the world. Noni was named an inaugural Queen’s Young Leader by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and a Commonwealth Young Achiever in 2015. She was named a policy influencer on SADC’s Top 100 Youth list in 2018 and is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society.
Lance Copegog sits as the Anishinabek Nation’s youth representative to the Ontario First Nations Young Peoples Council. He is a member of Beausoleil First Nation.
In 2016, he was appointed as the deputy youth chief of Beausoleil First Nation. In this role, Lance was consistent in meeting with federal and provincial governments and improved relations with local municipalities and school boards. He championed good governance and transparency. Lance also had the opportunity to address audiences in Canada and the United Kingdom on First Nations governance.
Lance was appointed by former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to sit on the Premier’s Council on Youth Opportunities. He provided advice on the legalization of cannabis, child welfare legislation including the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017, and the Ontario Strategy to End Human Trafficking.
In 2019, he was one of 53 young leaders – out of 5,000 applicants – selected by the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust to represent youth from the Commonwealth of Nations in London, England. As a One Young World ambassador, Lance works with international partners to bring attention to human rights, improve health and education, and advance the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He is also part of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus at the United Nations in New York.
An active volunteer, Lance sits on the board of directors for the Indigenous Sports Body, the Indigenous Youth Advisory Committee at the Laidlaw Foundation, and is a member of the Anishinabek Nation Youth Council. He has also volunteered his time with local initiatives and organizations.
He holds the Leadership Council portfolio.
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