Mosaic Bookclub Panel event - That Peckham Boy

I couldn’t wait till the end of the month to shout about our #thatPeckhamboy event.

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As you probably know what started out as a small event with a few book happy people in May very quickly started morphing and culminated into a lovey event with a Board member, members of ExCo and well over 60 people attending!

Ok let me back up. When Dilesh Sangaran and I took over the Co-Chair roles of Mosaic, we (committee and co-chairs ) decided to kick off our event schedule with a book club. We had a poll and the winning book was ‘That Peckham Boy' – By Kenny Imafidon . We stated reading the book only to find out it was a real page turner and was a story of his life, with glimpses of a young Nigerian Boy in Peckham living in a single parent household with understandable daddy issues, to a cycling weed dealing teenager, to wrongly being accused of murder and spending time in jail during trial, finding his faith in Jesus, to doing his A-levels in prison, to being acquitted and finding his feet again getting a ￡30k scholarship, to presenting his ‘Kenny report’ paper in the House of Commons in front of a crowd including Theresa May. All in all it was a great read, so I decided to bug Kenny on LinkedIn to come to our book club and he agreed! This was the turning point, the event went from virtual only to an added in person element at 20 Old Bailey. We secured a panel of Kenny, Maggie Semple, OBE, FCGI Semple (on our Board) and Tamar Hughes (Talent, Development and Inclusion Director). The discussion would be chaired by our brilliant Exec Sponsor, Mike Eakins.

The day finally arrived on 4th June. We first talked about the book, with committee member Taren Johal hosting the first half of the session with Kenny, he was easy to talk to, funny and knowledgeable. He spoke around accountability and agency, being intentional about remembering, a sense of gratitude, being curious and questioning, taking time to properly get to know people we work with and so many other things.

We then moved to the panel session to talk around wider Diversity Equity and Inclusion in the workspace. Rakesh Thakrar and Kenny talked about the importance of sponsorship to improve social mobility, equitable frameworks, development pathways and many other interesting themes.

There were also lots of information from Tamar Hughes (our Talent Development and Inclusion Director) and Michaela Gibson (our head of DEI) on the great offering we have here at Phoenix like the newly launched Gigs board (where people within the organisation can get short work experience in various areas of the business) our mentoring schemes, our work with social mobility, our Internship programmes, networking events, as well as our Race Action Plan.

We then raffled 30 signed books and stayed to chat with Kenny over food.?

It was really fun ??.

And I can’t end this post without giving a shout out to some key people who helped make it amazing Kenny Imafidon for agreeing to grace us with his presence,Michael Eakins for always stepping up and supporting us when we need him, Dilesh Sangaran for working through with me to making this event a reality, Dr Diahanne Rhiney BCAe for ensuring we got into Kenny's diary :), Simona Provenzano for supporting with organisation and comms Taren Johal for being such a great hostess and organiser , Matthew Brandon for securing a great venue, Michaela Gibson for always supporting us and for giving us books to give away, Tamar Hughes and Maggie Semple, OBE, FCGI for agreeing to be on our panel, our amazing EXco members Anna Franekova , Rakesh Thakrar, Quentin Zentner?for making the time to support us (and all their amazing PAs that made it possible for them to be there (the unsung heros that work magic??) Omotunde Lawal that got some of our Barings colleagues to attend, and most importantly for all for all the people that turned up and enjoyed with us, a big thank you. I for one am looking forward to our future events.

Our next book is #BothNotHalf by Jassa Ahluwalia........I'm off to bug the author to come for our event also ??????wish me luck!!

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I couldn’t pick a favourite photo so I did a photo collage