A new initiative to allow BME students and citizens to share experiences from around the world is to be launched with a speech by former foreign office minister Baroness Valerie Amos.

The new Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Fellows’ Network event of The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (WCMT) on Monday 11th January aims to ‘pool global learning’ and seek new solutions facing people of colour around the world.Yvonne Field, founder and CEO of the community-building initiative Ubele, has made it her life’s work to strengthen intergenerational leadership in the African Diaspora community.“Despite progress between 1950s and late 1980s, the community remains over-represented in some of our most challenging social issues,” she says. “Filling the leadership vacuum has become one of our most pressing needs”.

Having heard of ground-breaking projects in Atlanta, Georgia and New Zealand, in 2012 Yvonne applied for a Churchill Fellowship to see for herself how these movements were developing social leadership and community enterprise in African-American and Maori communities.The insights she gained during this time continue to feed into her work with Ubele’s entrepreneurs and change makers.

Now she is co-organising the new BAME network of Churchill Fellows, all of whom have spent time gleaning innovative practice and new perspectives from projects around the world. The network’s inaugural meeting next week will be attended by Baroness Valerie Amos from SOAS.

“This network will be an opportunity for Churchill Fellows to connect and collaborate, pooling global learning to bring new solutions to old problems. It’s another step towards a stronger leadership base in the UK’s BAME communities.”

The event will bring together Churchill Fellows who are interested in issues affecting BAME communities in the UK, and will provide an opportunity for the Fellows to share best practice and learning from their global travels.

Baroness Amos said: “Churchill Fellows are given the opportunity to network and share ideas of how best to bring about societal change. This chimes well with what we do at SOAS. Our students want to make a positive difference in the world. “

For more information visit: www.wcmt.org.uk