Black All Year
Black History Month plays a crucial role, but it's essential to acknowledge that the celebration of Black heritage and culture extends beyond just one month. It's a year-round commitment involving celebration, recognition, support, education, and advocacy. Hosting this podcast is Steph Edusei, a renowned leader, speaker, and coach. As an Ashanti-Geordie woman with mixed Ghanaian and English roots from the North East of England, she brings a unique perspective to the table.
Black All Year
Black All Year - Why Black All Year
Rooted in Africa, Raised in the North East, United for Social Change
Embark on a personal journey with me, Steph Edusei, as we navigate the intricate blend of my Black African Ghanaian roots and white Geordie upbringing in the industrial backdrop of 70s and 80s Newcastle. Picture the vibrant sounds of African music intermingling with the robust community spirit of the North East – this episode isn't just my story, but a tribute to the cultural mélange that shaped my childhood and ignited a life-long passion for social justice.
Gearing up for the new season of Black All Year, I throw open the doors for your insights and experiences to join our tapestry of conversations. Whether you're drawn in by the quality of the discourse or the fight for progress towards race equity, your voice is crucial. As we join together to amplify Black voices and narratives throughout the year, your engagement – from subscribing and reviewing to participating as a guest – helps me to weave an ever-richer dialogue. So, let's raise the volume on these shared stories, and strive for understanding and inclusion with every episode.
Steph Edusei LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/steph-edusei/
Steph Edusei Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stephedusei/
Original music by Wayne C McDonald, #ActorSlashDJ
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Hi everyone, I'm Steph Edusei and welcome to the new season of Black All Year. Now, if any of you listened to season one, you will notice a little bit of a difference in season two, but more about that later. In this episode what I really want to do is talk a little bit about Black All Year, how it came about and what we aim to do. But I thought it might be worth me introducing myself first, because I don't think that's ever anything I've actually done throughout the whole of this journey. So, as I say Steph Edusei, I am a Senior Leader in Health and Care and I am delighted and honoured to be the Chief Executive of St Oswald's Hospice, which is a large children's and adult hospice based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north east of England. I'm also a coach, a speaker, and I am the creator of Black All Year.
Steph Edusei:Now I actually grew up in the 1970s and 80s, yes, I am that old, but I grew up in Newcastle Tyne, and Newcastle then was a very, very different place to how it is now. It was predominantly white, very industrial, at the time we still had that very strong industry of shipbuilding. We still actually had things like coal mines. Like I say, I am that old and it was a really fantastic place to grow up, but also as a Black person, it was quite isolated. There weren't a huge amount of people who were Black in the Northeast East, and in Newcastle there was a slightly higher South Asian population and East Asian, predominantly Chinese, population, but definitely not of Black African or Caribbean heritage. I myself am actually of mixed heritage. I have a Black African Ghanaian father who came across to Newcastle in around 1963 to study and met my mother. My Mam is a proper born and bred Geordie. She's actually white, very white. She has red hair and she grew up just outside of Newcastle on the banks of the River Tyne. So she is about as Geordie as you can get, and I like to call myself an Ashanti Geordie.
Steph Edusei:Although I grew up in Newcastle, a lot of my upbringing was influenced by my father's black African culture and also our family members that were around us, and you might wonder what I mean by that. Well, there were foods that I ate that people around me didn't eat. I'm always amazed to find out that some people in the 70s and 80s weren't eating rice as standard, weren't eating spicy food as standard. A nd actually a lot of music that I listened to that we had when we had family parties was very different to the music that a lot of people were listening to at the time. We had that very much, that, um, that influence of Black culture, but actually we were listening to music by African artists as well. So really, really different at that time. Not so different now, when music comes from all around the world and I really celebrate that, but it was, it was, it was different. A nd things like we had family members that would live with us, and live with us for extended periods of time, and that was just normal. So I, but I thought that everybody had this. I thought that everybody would have an uncle who came and stayed with them for months and sometimes longer.
Steph Edusei:To me, that was just the way I was brought up. I was used to having huge parties and going to huge parties with lots and lots of uncles and aunties. It then turned out that actually there weren't even uncles and aunties, they were just friends of the family. But that respect that you gave people in calling people uncle and auntie and things like that, which in some ways, it's quite strange. It's something that was very much and still remains very much that Black culture, and it's also there in South Asian and other cultures, but it's quite dominant in the northeast as well, actually, that you call your next door auntie out out of respect. So, yeah, I grew up in that kind of experience of being very different, being mixed heritage. Most people around me were white, and if they weren't white, they were then of full heritage, so full South Asian, full Black African, full Black Caribbean or whatever, and not mixed. I certainly didn't see any adults growing up as mixed heritage, and it may be that we'll do a future episode about being of mixed heritage and what that may bring.
Steph Edusei:One of the things, though, that at some point I acquired or maybe I was just born with it, maybe it's a family thing, I don't know, is that I developed a really strong value that was about fairness. I can tolerate a lot of things as long as they're fair, and out of that underpinning value of fairness has come a passion and I hate to use the word passion, because everybody uses passion, don't they? But it is. It's a passion for equity and inclusion. And I use the term equity on purpose. It's not equality, because equality isn't fair. Equity recognises that different people start in different places, and if we are going to give them equity of access, equity of experience, equity of outcomes, they will need different things, and some people may need more, and that's just the way things are and that that is fine. So, yeah, very much about equity and very much about inclusion. This isn't about being allowed to sit at the table. It's about being completely included and being a part of everything that goes on and feeling comfortable with that inclusion.
Steph Edusei:I've got to say, though, I am not an expert in Blackness. I am not an expert in Black matters; in race equity. I've learned a fair bit over time, but I'm by no means an expert, and all I'm trying to do with Black All Year is to bring some knowledge, some questions and some people who are more expert than I am to a bigger stage, so that people can hear their thoughts, their views and think, which takes me really on to why Black All Year exists. So, for quite a few years now, I have been asked to talk at events around Black History Month in the UK. Now Black History Month in the UK is in October, and what I would find is normally, quite late in the day actually, which in itself is quite interesting, but I would get asked if I could speak at, mainly employers', events about being Black; the Black experience; about being a Black leader; about being a Black female leader; all of these things I would be asked to talk about and I would happily do it.
Steph Edusei:You know, I don't mind talking about these things and I think it's important that we share that information. However, what I would find is that once Black History Month had passed, nobody asked me to talk about those things. They may have asked me to talk about other things, but they didn't ask me to talk about things relating to ethnicity and race, and I got a bit sick of only being considered to be Black, but that's not true, people only wanting to talk about the fact that I was Black, openly and to talk about the issues that might affect people who share my skin tones at a certain time of year, because it was Black History Month and therefore we need to talk about this stuff. A nd I kept saying to people, "ouldn't it be just great if we could do this all year round, if we could talk about some of these issues in May, for example, if we could keep the conversation going and that that might actually start to make some real change, rather than it being a bit of a tokenistic thing that went on during Black History Month and people will go, yeah, that would be a great idea. And then another year would go by and nothing happened.
Steph Edusei:We then had 2020 and the killing of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd, and things went crazy. All of a sudden, I was being asked to speak more about being Black, and it wasn't Black History Month, but it was that frenzy as organisations and companies leapt to, kind of, wave their Black flag and show their Black credentials and then, guess what, Black History Month came and went and it all went quiet again. And I think at that point I just about had enough. I really kind of thought this is ridiculous. So another Black History Month came around in 2021, and I thought I've got to do something about this, nobody's paying any attention. I have to create something. And it was a chance conversation with somebody a couple of months later that commented that with the pandemic, we had suddenly found a whole load of just one hour webinars that people were running and that that might be a way in which I could take Black All Year, as it became, forward. And that's exactly what I did.
Steph Edusei:In April 2022, I held my first online event for Black All Year. It was an hour long and we had a speaker and we had a number of people who joined that webinar to learn more about Inclusion with Humanity and it went really really well. And one of the things I'd realised was, because it was online, I could record it, so if people couldn't join live they could watch the recording. But also I had the audio. And that was when Black All Year podcast was created, because I simply took the audio from the live event and used that as a podcast. A nd over the next two years, we've had about 14 live events and a number of just for podcast episodes as well. A nd we've discussed a whole range of issues such as Black maternal mortality, Black men's mental health, the, the importance of language, as well as having interviews with the first Black Police and Crime Commissioner in the UK, with dancers, with authors. A nd one of the things that I'm really proud of is some of the amazing feedback that I got about how it has changed people's perceptions and how it's introduced concepts and situations that particularly white people were just not aware of. And I've also had a lot of thanks from People of Colour for creating this platform; for allowing some really important, and difficult at times, topics to be discussed, and for using my voice to amplify theirs; and that has just been a massive honour and privilege to be able to do that.
Steph Edusei:Now, this has been me, and as you heard at the beginning, I'm quite a busy woman. I do quite a few things. I'm a dance teacher as well as a number of other things aside from that, and it was really getting to be a lot. But I couldn't drop Black All Year. It was just too important and it was doing a job that needed to be done. So, I reflected and have decided to change the format. So, Season Two of Black All Year is, as I said, different to the previous season. All of those back episodes are there. So if you want to learn about any of these things and hear those conversations, and I really hope you do if you haven't already, and that you take the time to listen to them when you're on a walk or whatever, please go back and access them. But these are going to be shorter episodes so they will be more accessible. You should be able to listen to them on a short commute or whatever. They're also going to be more frequent.
Steph Edusei:I'm aiming aiming for weekly. We may have the odd glitch in that, but I'm really hoping that I'm going to be able to maintain weekly and at the moment, we've got some fantastic guests lined up to make sure that that happens. And podcasting is going to be the main platform. Now, that's not to say that there won't ever be any live events, because there probably will be in future, but podcast is going to be where I'm focusing my energies for now. It is the most effective way to have this discussion and for people to hear.
Steph Edusei:I am always willing and happy and, in fact, I would encourage you to give me feedback. I encourage you to contact me and let me know what you want to hear discussed, what you want to know more about. If you would like to be a guest I'm really keen to hear from you too. But this is Black All Year and that is me, Steph Edusei. I'm really looking forward to the new season and to sharing with you. Please remember to subscribe, to rate and to review this podcast, because it'll make sure that you get access to it as quickly as possible, but it also helps others to find the content too, and that's what this is all about. Take care, everyone, and I shall speak with you very soon.
