To celebrate Black History Month, we are celebrating Black women leading frontline organisations that are making a big difference to local communities. We spoke to Michelle Dornelly, founder of Children with Voices, about what motivated her to set up the charity and what Black women have been influential in her own life.
“The whole reason I set up Children with Voices is because it was clear to me that children in my community don’t have a platform to speak. Nobody is listening to them. At school, no one is listening to them. When they come home, home is overcrowded. Or home is where mum has mental health issues. Home is where mum and dad are fighting. Home is where there’s no food in the cupboard. Yet society is expecting them to do their GCSCs, so they have to study and do homework. Where are they supposed to be doing that? Libraries are shut down or not accessible. There are very few youth clubs, no halls. Police brutality is on the rise.”
Moment of realisation
Her determination to make a change came out of her lived experience growing up in East London. “My children have special needs, with sickle cell disease and ADHD. I had to keep going to the schools to try and get support for them. Meeting after meeting, with no external help. Parents who saw I was fighting for my children asked me to help them too.
And then my son started to experience problems with gangs and with the police. I used to have panic attacks because I’d hear a lot of police going up and down our road. I’d hear a noise outside and I’d rush to my bedroom window to see what it was. Nine times out of ten, it’ll be them attacking my children.“
She soon realised that her children couldn’t walk about safely or socialise. “They couldn’t do the brotherly things, like go and play football, go to McDonald’s.“
As a professional keep-fit instructor and a long-found love of cooking, she took these skills and set up the keep-fit ‘jumping beans’ programme and a cooking club to create healthy eating attitudes.
“I’d wait outside every school and hand my leaflets out to the parents. Parents liked what I was doing. A local housing association awarded me inspirational tenant and funded my cooking sessions.”
Empowering the next generation of young people
Now these sessions form the basis of Children with Voices.
“We’re making a real difference tackling childhood obesity. This summer, we had 22 children who did not know how to swim, and now they can swim! For us, that’s an achievement. We were taking them to the Laburnham Boat Club I decided that I was not taking any child that could not swim. Back to our day, school swimming lessons were compulsory. Now that’s been taken away, and local pools are being closed down or are just too expensive. So we organised for these 22 children to learn how to swim. But these facilities should be free of charge – available to all children.
The cooking project is also really popular.
“The children love baking, and obviously cooking is part of learning basic life skills, which stops them from buying takeaway food! We want to empower children with basic life skills.
We’re combatting childhood hunger. There should never ever be a child that should go hungry. We run the food hub, and since COVID we’ve opened up 19 pop up food hubs, and we’ve had four regular hubs running continuously for at least two, three years. So we see the need And we’ve got people that are coming up to us saying, I’ve got four children. So I have to decide, do they have a microwave meal today, or do they have a bath? When you hear those stories on the ground, you get so emotional because you just cannot understand how you’ve got people living in expensive houses, earning money that they can’t spend, and then you’ve got these people that have worked so hard, yet they’re suffering.
We also run children and young children sessions including individuals with learning challenges and different disabilities. We fight the stigma against individuals with these learning challenges. We’ve got amazingly talented children that can draw, use arts and crafts to express themselves creatively.
Our future hope with SEN – special educational needs and disability – is to have a department and to watch it flourish and grow with understanding staff who are passionate about what we’re doing.
We’re empowering our next generation of children. They are the future, and unless we put a 101 percent into the young people, what future are we providing for them? The whole thing about our project is about making the young people know that when they come here, they’ve got mentors that are brothers and sisters. It might not be your blood brothers and sisters because your blood brothers and sisters might be in a gang or they might be doing something different. We want to give you that family unit when you’re here. We want to encourage and reassure them that we are here and we will always be here to support each and every one of them as well as their families. We remind them that they have a voice and they could do anything they put their minds to. They are amazing and that we are all value their thoughts, value their opinions.”
Her eldest son has been able to reflect on his experience as a young Black boy. “He’s written it down for me. ‘One of the struggles I faced in school was the fear of failure. Growing up, I’ve been told that I won’t make it, and I’ll be like every other Black boy whose thrown away their life to crime. And that always held me back. But as I got older, I stopped caring about what people had to say, and I’m changing this stereotype by having my head down and working as hard as I possibly can to make myself, my siblings, and my Mum proud.” It makes me cry, reading that.”
Inspiration
Finally, we ask Michelle about Black women who have inspired her.
“First is Nanny of the Maroons, who was captured as a slave but escaped to Jamaica and led a community called the Windward Maroons. She was winning wars as a woman with so much power, commanding men as well, who listened and respected her.
Next is Harriet Tubman who decided to put her own life on hold to free slaves, which was very dangerous. She got shot at but she kept going.
My inspiration comes from these women who had to see their children being ripped from them, had to see their husbands being attacked, but they stayed strong and they fought and they fought.
Whether they tried to escape, whether they made changes, whether they helped other slaves escape – for me, they’re the true heroines because they were faced with rape and death, but they stood firm.
I’m also inspired by the women who took part in the huge March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs [in 1963] – the famous one that Martin Luther King spoke at. The women that marched were attacked by dogs. They were getting bitten by dogs. The police were beating them up. But they still they marched. These women were fighting to make change.
Anytime I feel down, I remember they didn’t give up. They give me the energy to make change because without them, I would not be here. We would not have a vote. We would not be able to have jobs. They are the true heroines because they made history.”
Want to learn more about the difference we’re making across London’s East End? Check out our Impact section here.
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