The Spirit of London Awards

The nominations for this Years Spirit of London Awards are now up and running. It seems like only Yesterday we were being introduced to the Class of 2009 at the inaugural awards show and now the countdown to the 2010 event is underway. If we are half as lucky with the outstanding quality of the nominees and eventual category winners this Year as we were last then we will be truly blessed!

What with the election and then the new Government settling in this has not been the easiest of years for anyone in the youth services sector. The on going development of SOLA and the organisation that goes into it has been a huge ask therefore and it is only thanks to the wonderful young advisors who volunteer their time to help manage the project that has kept us going.

Alongside the young people that get nominated for the awards it is the young people we get to work with on the project that keep us inspired and dedicated to keep doing all we can to make sure that the promotion of positive young people continues – We have big plans with the development of the SOLA Foundation which will be unveiled once this Years project is fully nailed down and the “Class of 2010″ is taking shape.

The youth of today truly are the leaders of tomorrow and we are seeing pletny of leaders emerge from this project right across the board…

Make sure to read all the young peoples blogs now appearing here on the site and be prepared to hear a lot less from me and a lot more from them.. The Spirit of London is in good hands.

Gary – Damilola Taylor Trust

Just a quick update to let everyone know that the new website will launch in next week or so in time for the launch of the nominations for this year awards. It has been a tough Year after the success of last Years inaugural event as the lies and false promises of the outgoing Government left us in a very tough place even before this new era of austerity and cuts the new Government has announced. We appreciate fully that cuts have to be made but of course we are also acutely aware that the urban inner city areas are likely to suffer worse than most. Shit flows downhill as my old Granny used to say!

We have just had to get on with it as we cannot give up on what we believe in just because there is no funding. our belief that promoting the positive majority through the Spirit of london awards and other related projects makes a difference is unshakeable and the success of what we achieved last Year is still vibrant. This years award show will be at the Indigo O2 on Saturday 27th November!

While the nominations will launch to the public formally at the end of August through The Sun, London Evening Standard and Kiss FM you can already post any nominations you have in the various categories if you visit www.spiritoflondonawards.com/test and click on the nomination button on the home page. We are adding a directory of youth services available across the 33 Boroughs that correllate with the categories and we are also adding a COMMUNITY SAFETY feature that will offer links to organisations that can support those at risk.

We are delighted also that The Mayor of London is supporting us again this Year by making the opening speech on the night and presenting the young Hero award again. He is a bag fan of positive youth movements.

We have a great team coming together behind the scenes to bolster our efforts to establish SOLA as the definitive awards programme for young people in London as we drive towards 2012 and the biggest party London has ever seen… On yes and we are looking forward to the Olympics as well!

Stay blessed and may the Spirit of London be strong in you.

Gary Trowsdale
Damilola Taylor Trust/SOLA Foundation

Today the front page headlines are dominated by the election. Today we must decide which surgeon we think can best fix the wounds. Today we must decide which captain is best suited to steer our ship out of troubled waters. Today we find on the inside pages that a 16 Year old boy was stabbed to death in Sydenham South London yesterday and yet another family now grieves through the night.

That makes a total of 10 youth fatalities in London this Year so far and 7 in the last 6 weeks. Let us hold our breath until the next batch of statistics find their way to us from the home Office telling us that crime is falling and in their unique and strangely compelling special language of stakeholders and practitioners put our minds at rest that their strategies are working. They are not.

Damilola would have been 21 on December 7th this Year. Damilola wanted to make the World a better place. We will celebrate his short life on November 27th with a 10th anniversary Memorial concert in his memory. Damilola’s killer will be released before this landmark date. He will have served only 4 Years in youth detention centres. Can we satisfy ourselves that justice has been served? Yet again let us wait for the statistics to wing our way telling us that the justice system is working and that the Ministry of Justice has got everything under control. It has not.

If the Ministry of food was run by Turkeys they would send out statistics showing that the well being of the nation would be greatly enhanced if the staple diet of Xmas dinner was Lamb!

The Damilola Taylor Trust has tried to find solutions by creating unique projects such as the Spirit of London Awards – We believe that the vast majority of our young people are positive and upstanding citizens – In this respect we understand fully what the term “Big Society” means. Obama used the term community more so than Society and we knew what he meant as well.

We live in a far from perfect world but the strength of community and the spirit that emanates from the collective coming together of communities in diversity can mend many ills – The “Big State” that controls Government policy leads, dictates front line spending and manages “the system” is what needs fixing – Not Britain. We are Britain and we are not broken. We just need better leadership to help us find our way out of the TOTAL STATE the big state has put us in.

Use your vote and use your vote well but remember in the end it is you – It is your family – Your local community and your collective spirit that will make things better again – Our new Government must end the oppression of the state and release us from its deathly grip. The old Government Ministers did not mean for knife carriers not to be punished and for murderers to be given light sentences – They were just not strong enough to impose themselves on the people running the SYSTEM. The system is flawed so let’s tear it up and start again.

Tomorrow we might know the name of our new Prime Minister. Tomorrow we will know the name of the 16 Year old boy from Sydenham. Treat both names with the same relevance and never stop seeking the change that only we the people aided by strong Government can find – Collectively.

Gary Trowsdale
DAMILOLA TAYLOR TRUST

It has been a very busy start to 2010 for the Damilola Taylor Trust so apologies for the gap in between blogs. I have been snowed under with more than just snow!

We have launched a new anti youth violence campaign called COUNT ME IN – TOGETHER WE CAN STOP KNIFE CRIME.

The project was launched by our family collective FAMILIES UTD on Monday 15th March 2010 when the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Minister for Schools joined the families at Lillian Baylis School in Kennington South London to talk to the pupils about the campaign.

Here is a video of the first day launch

The campaign has been developed so that it can grow organically and evolve as the membership gathers momentum – This first phase of activity for the launch saw the families of Robert Knox, Damilola Taylor, Ben Kinsella, David Idowu and Jimmy Mizen come together to tell their tragic stories and in doing so call for young people to stand behind them in condemning knife crime. after the first visit the families crossed London to visit a school in Haringey before Richard Taylor and Brooke Kinsella set off on a week long tour of schools around the Country.

The launch was a huge success with 30,000 people joining the Facebook group page in the first week. The Facebook page is being used as the sign post and meeting point for the campaign and Facebook themselves have been hugely supportive with some free ads and helpful training for the young people who are acting as administrators for the page.

The next phase of activity with the campaign which now has 36,000 active members attached is that we have joined forces with the Young Advisor’s charity and are now embarking on the development of the campaign by having young people shape and mould it as a force for good. The intention is to create a positive youth MOVEMENT by targeting the positive majority who are not involved with gangs and would never be so stupid as to carry a knife in the first place. Creating a huge swell of positive peer pressure is the immediate goal – Young people such as those who were nominated for the inaugural Spirit of London Awards last Year are the future of London and the largest percentage of them want nothing to do with the negative culture of the knife, gun or gang.

Families Utd will continue to support the campaign with more school visits and events being planned and Brooke Kinsella will remain its figurehead. Young people will POWER its development now though as we believe that destiny is a self – fulfilling prophecy!

On to the subject of Spirit of London Awards 2010 and last week we visited our great friend Mayor Boris at City Hall so that he could present certificates of achievement to last years category runners up

The video link is courtesy of achievement through music winner Mariamba Samba

The mayor is a huge fan of the project of course and we now hope to work with him more cohesively as we work towards this Years event but also of course with one eye firmly on 2012.

The Damilola Taylor Trust is dedicated to seeing youth crime eradicated and our streets reclaimed for the innocent and positive majority – Celebrating the positive majority and giving them the spotlight and headlines they deserve is the way we feel that we can best serve our purpose. Our young people are counting on us and we in turn are counting on them!

The Spirit of London Awards nominations for 2010 will launch through our media partners in June this Year and I am really pleased to say that the Sun are supporting us again this Year so be ready to start nominating!

Until our paths cross again shortly – Make sure to sign up to the COUNT ME IN campaign if you have not already done, click the logo above and then click like on Facebook. (Don’t forget to invite your friends as well).

May the Spirit of London be strong in you!

Gary Trowsdale
DAMILOLA TAYLOR TRUST

I hope everyone battling youth violence in the 3rd sector applauds, as the Damilola Taylor Trust do, the editorial bravery of the London Evening Standard this week in the decision they have taken to put the spotlight on the appalling poverty that exists in our City – click here to view the article.

How can any politician, no matter what party they represent, expect crime and the escalation into violence it causes be dealt with when such squalor exists right on our doorsteps? As Noel Gallagher once flippantly remarked “If 1 in 4 of our children live under the poverty line of course youth crime is an issue and they will be killing each other with knives” – Let the burden of eradicating the problem first and foremost be the task of the next Government. Let them come out and admit that it is a problem more pressing than anything else on their agenda.

Lets make poverty history by tearing down the sink estates and by providing front line services to give those at risk more opportunity – Let people not effected by poverty recognise it is rife in the UK and stop donating money right left and centre to foreign aid projects – never mind comic relief and red noses, what about “NEVER MIND THE COMEDY, POVERTY IS RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES AND IT AINT FUNNY!” – If all the money raised by these telethons was put into a central UK REGENERATION fund then it could make a difference.

Nothing excuses the taking of a life of a young one and the Spirit of London Awards, through the wonderful young people it spotlights shows that no matter what the deprivation and disadvantage, we have the greatest young people in the world. This is not the point. The point is that until we invest in ripping down the sink estates that exist in every Borough of London we don’t have a chance of eradicating youth violence altogether. Our sticking plasters are all very good but the cancer of poverty and the crime it gives birth to cannot be dealt with this way. One final thought… Perhaps the designers responsible for a twisted, broken and dishevelled looking logo for London 2012 were being ironic?

Gary Trowsdale – Executive Director, SOLA 2010

In a nutshell – To build on the great success of the inaugural awards programme and make this Years event even bigger and better. We were lucky to have such worthy young people to work with as anyone who was at the event or saw the TV highlights show will have seen for themselves. Being optimistic for the future is easy when you see the achievements of positive young people and realise that things are never as bleak as the media coverage of the feral minority suggests. One of our big aims for this Year is to work with the nominees and award category winners so as to support them as SOLA Ambassadors – They are now the flag bearers of the brand so this is part of the projects on-going development. Our aim is that by 2012 the awards programme will be a fixture with all 33 Boroughs and that the awards event can be a highlight of the Olympic celebrations.

I will update this blog on a regular basis now as we look to consolidate the projects long term future. It was very tough for us last Year as the scope of the project was huge for a tiny organisation like the Damilola Taylor Trust and being left to find the full funding of the event in such a tough economical climate was a challenge I still cant quite believe we managed to pull off.

This is history now and for the future we are hoping that we can get supported by relevant authority bodies so that we can truly establish the projects credentials as a window of opportunity for London’s Young People.

Thank you for your continued support. The nominations for 2010 will commence shortly.

All the best for 2010.

Gary Trowsdale
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR – SPIRIT OF LONDON AWARDS

The 27th of November 2009 was one of the proudest nights I have known. Despite the sadness of the occasion of the 9th anniversary of my son,  Damilola’s death, it was also a time of great joy for me to witness the feats and accomplishment of so many wonderful young people at the inaugural Spirit of London Awards event. Meeting these young people and hearing first hand of the work they do to not just better their own lives but also the lives of others in their local communities, well, it was hugely inspiring. Then this week I have been brought back to earth with a huge bump as yet another young life has been lost in London to the evil of the knife.

Since becoming the Prime Minister’s envoy for youth violence and knife crime earlier this Year I have travelled around the Country meeting many people and organisations who are actively seeking solutions to the problems of youth violence. I have met with faith leaders and i have met with many families who have suffered a similar tragedy to my own. I have also met with many young people who come from communities blighted by poverty and hardship. The thread that knits all these people together is an aspiration to see youth violence eradicated and peace to reign on our streets. They do not seek to attach blame or pass the buck to Governments or local authorities for the hardships they face they instead choose to fight to bring change positively through their passion for life and helping each other.

I am so sad today that all of those that are fighting to make their communities better places despite the recession and problems they face are having to read about another act of cowardice and brutality. Let us be clear, this is what we are talking about when some imbecile uses a knife to take the life or injure another human being. I did not know Salum Kombo the young 18 Year old youth from Bow in East London who was murdered by another young man for what we are led to believe was “disrespecting” him on his Facebook page. All I know is that he was only 18 and he had his whole life in front of him. Now he is simply another sad statistic of the cowardice and stupidity that is blighting our local communities especially in London. This small but feral minority of cowards and brutes that associate themselves with gang culture need to be dealt with by not just the authorities and criminal justice system, they need to be made to hang their heads in shame and change their ways or be cast out by the entire community they choose to blight. It is time to act as it has gone on for too long that these idiots should bring shame to us all.

Please take a look at the wonderful young people here on the awards page of this website and you will see that the vast majority of young people in London are fantastic upstanding young ambassadors who we can be proud of. Over 3,000 nominations were received and most of these were from young people voting “peer to peer” for other young people. This is the TRUE MEANING OF RESPECT! The demented imbeciles that follow the culture of the gang cannot be allowed to kidnap the meaning of the word to cover up their own inadequacies.

I am a resident of Greenwich and in my Borough we have a super entertainment complex known as the O2 arena. For some reason the cowards that call themselves gang boys prey on the area around the O2 and attack people who go there to enjoy themselves.

Why should this be?

It cannot be tolerated any-more!

Christmas is upon us and so I am urging that in the true “Spirit” of Xmas the black community faces up to the sad statistics that have blighted us for too long and rise as one to call for an end once and for all to the gang culture and feral activity this minority of cowards forces on us. Let those of us with a pride and passion in our community come to the fore to support the wonderful young people such as those who are now SOLA Ambassadors – Take a look at the work of the young man, Alexander Rose, who is our “Official Youth Ambassador” for SOLA 2010. Take a look at  battlefront.co.uk/campaign/stop-gun-and-knife-crime/ and you will see what fine upstanding citizens we can take pride in. For anyone that was not lucky enough to see his closing speech at the inaugural event make sure to set your videos to record the repeat of the show on the community channel at 9pm on 29th December. Truly inspiring and indicative of the way our young people can rise above the rubbish the small minority try and impose on them.

Finally, I have to report that my time as Envoy for the Prime Minister has been largely encouraging and that despite my sadness at this latest futility, the problems caused by the small minority are being tackled through positive actions by all involved. In this respect the statistics also do not lie. I cannot say that I am happy with the judiciary as clearly there is much that needs doing to bring reform in this area so that the TIME FITS THE CRIME as they say. Magistrates and judges still tend to be too lenient on the perpetrators for my liking and with my fellow family members of www.familiesutd.com I will be taking this up with the justice Ministry again shortly. It is all too easy for the media to blame the Government or police authorities for failing to impose tougher sentences but the guidelines are clear and in my view it is the judiciary that needs to be tougher so the Civil servants that administrate in this area need to take more responsibility as it is clear that the Government Ministers especially the Prime Minister wish to see tougher sentencing.

As we enter this time of festive cheer I will also be calling for restraint on the part of all concerned with the forthcoming election. Restraint as in not looking to make knife crime and youth violence a political football. In reality, the problems our inner cites in particular face have been brewing for many years and are largely the result of mistakes that have been made over many years and many different Governments. Let us all put our hands up and declare an interest in seeing the problems resolved as a common interest.

A Merry Christmas to you all

Richard Taylor – Official PM envoy for youth violence and knife crime

So the clock on the home page has got to zero and I guess you all know what that means!

Before I try and get myself into the zone ready to tackle the last piece of the journey that started around 18 months ago I am just reflecting that tonight is the beginning of a new journey not the end of an old one!

THE SPIRIT OF LONDON is now a living breathing entity and tonight we will see 23 individuals and groups of young people descend on the Alexandra Palace, hearts beating and adrenalin racing through them…the stars of the show -  The COMMUNITY OSCARS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

My amazing, but tiny management team has made it happen for them and I am immensely proud of them all – that’s the young people AND my management team.

By 2012 the awards programme will be linking every like minded organisation like the DTT together,  we need to apply joined up thinking to the problems we face in our local communities, we need cohesion, we need the people that put the SPIRIT into the spirit of London to come to the fore and join hands. This is the foundation for the Spirit of London Awards and is why so many links can already be found on the affiliates page.

Tonight the young people who attend the awards show will be entertained like royalty – they deserve it!  This is their moment and they ARE ALL WINNERS!  Next year we will widen the scope of the show and make it more inclusive. This year the only way to make it happen was to take the corporate route and as the recession bites deepest at our level and it has been very tough finding the financial backing to make this happen. Sponsors do not particularly like the space we operate in and in a time of recession agencies don’t like to touch anything new. It has been VERY TOUGH INDEED.

It has also been worth it as by putting the spotlight on positivity we create peer pressure to help the momentum for change continue. The young people attending tonight’s show come from the majority of young Londoners, not the very small minority that blight our local communities. This feral menace need stamping on by the authorities so that these young champions can get on with their work in taking our great City forward.

Please take a moment tonight to spare a thought for Richard Taylor and his family -  find a corner of your heart to park the thought in for eternity. Damilola was murdered on a dark and damp stairwell on the North Peckham Estate 9 years ago today and and so won’t be picking up his COMMUNITY CHAMPION AWARD TONIGHT.  He will be holding it high above his head in heaven though and smiling down on us with his mum SOLA Taylor by his side. God Bless the innocent and herald the great young people of our proud old city.

Be blessed and get ready for SOLA 2010!

Gary Trowsdale – Executive Director – THE SPIRIT OF LONDON AWARDS