Celebrating Black History Month at Credera

October 2021 was our first year celebrating Black History Month across both our UK and US offices as a global firm. This year, we decided to celebrate the event in three ways: by understanding the history, hearing personal stories, and building a community. Here is what we got up to during Black History Month.

Credera Film Club session

The month began with a film night hosted by Credera’s Film Club lead, Hani Qadiri. For this session, we put together a shortlist of films - all on the topic of black history - and voted on the one that we should all watch and discuss together on the night. The Small Axe historic film series by Steve McQueen capturing the experiences of London's West Indian community proved to be the most popular choice, so we watched the film and discussed what we had learned from this anthology.

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Spotlights

During our monthly company-wide meeting, Credera colleagues John Ihekuna and Rebecca Onifade presented on black figures (past or present) they find inspiring. We then continued the storytelling theme with our colleagues in America. Peter Yobo and Bria Ford joined us from our Texas office to share their own experiences of what it’s been like for them to be black in consulting. Throughout the session, they answered questions from the audience in what turned out to be a really eye-opening discussion of black identity in our industry.

CredCOLOUR

To end the month of celebrations, we held two events - the first being our global CredCOLOUR meetup. CredCOLOUR is our internal community where we celebrate minority cultures and faiths. As a group, we also plan ways of making Credera the best place to work if you are from a racial/cultural minority background. This global get together proved to be an amazing opportunity to meet everyone who is a part of the CredCOLOUR community from around the world. Through exchanging stories and questions, we learned a lot about ourselves and each other. Our second and final event of the month was a talk with one of the most famous black figures in the UK - former England international and Liverpool FC player, John Barnes. During the event, John spoke about his experiences in the UK as a black footballer and his view on how we can combat the issue of racism moving forward. It was a powerful talk and he delivered some important messages about the need to focus on structural inequality rather than individual incidents.

Diversity at Credera

Black History Month is just one of the ways we celebrate and represent different backgrounds here at Credera. We’re also dedicated to playing a leading role in the industry and tackling wider inequality in society. This is why we’ve committed to a target of having 30% of our staff from minority ethnic backgrounds, including across leadership positions, by 2025. We’ve also partnered with The Hebe Foundation to play a proactive role in improving social mobility for young people, particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds. Next year, we’re aiming to build upon the successes of this year with a view of continuing on our path to a more diverse workplace.