The CEO of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust talks to David Adams about the impact of the trust on the lives of young people from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds and how the BLM movement could lead to lasting social change.

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The brutal murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a group of white racists at a south London bus stop in April 1993, and the botched investigation of the crime – hampered by incompetence and institutional racism – remain open wounds on the face of British society. Two of the five people who attacked Stephen were finally convicted in 2012; the others have never been brought to justice.

In 1998, Stephen’s mother, Doreen, now Baroness Lawrence, launched the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, to give bursaries and other resources to young people from ethnic minority or deprived backgrounds who want to train as architects – Stephen’s childhood ambition. In recent years, the Trust has evolved to provide a broader range of services, under the leadership of another child of Jamaican immigrants, Sonia Watson, its chief executive since 2015.

Watson grew up in Northampton, one of five children raised by her mother Joyce, a single parent for most of their childhood, who gave her children two pieces of career advice. The first was not to follow in her footsteps and work as a nurse. “Actually, she loved her job, but it was too hard,” says Watson. “She often worked nights so she could see us in the day. She didn’t want that life for us.”

The second piece of advice was to work hard. “My mother said: ‘You’re going to have to work twice as hard to get half as far as other people’,” Watson says.

A hard worker

She did work hard at school, with impressive results, academically, but also in sport: she represented England as a sprinter and a long- jumper at junior level, giving up her athletic ambitions in her mid-teens, in part because her family would have found it difficult to keep paying for her training and kit. Later, in her 20s, she also represented England at netball.
By then she had completed a degree in English at the University of Bedfordshire, taken a graduate job at Barclays and become the first black person to be given a place on its fast- track, high potential programme.

She worked for the bank for 16 years, in areas including mergers and acquisitions and corporate banking. Did her mother’s words about having to work twice as hard ring true?
“I was always the only black woman, but I didn’t feel as if I was affected by racism at the time,” she says. “Now, looking back, I do believe there may have been some instances where I was held back for that reason.”

She is very grateful for some excellent mentoring she received from senior colleagues, giving her a keen appreciation of the difference a good mentor can make.

But Watson’s work at Barclays also encouraged an interest in the subject of diversity within workforces; in particular the factors that prevent many people from minority backgrounds reaching senior management positions in businesses and other organisations.

She left Barclays in 2001 to become a consultant, working with public and private sector clients; and setting up her own consultancy firm in 2009. In 2013, she was invited to complete some work for the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, which was facing serious financial difficulties.

“It was about putting in some structure to professionalise the charity,” she explains. “They didn’t have any systematic processes or clear strategic objectives. The charity was failing. It was all rooted in what happened to Stephen; and not what could happen because of him.”
A temporary assignment became permanent, with Watson serving as deputy to an interim CEO, then becoming CEO herself in March 2015.

The Trust then had six staff and was about £500,000 in debt. It was still tightly focused on helping young people train as architects and had only a limited funding base. Watson devised a strategy to expand its operations. She built new relationships with potential funders, architects and other employers in the built environment industries. She cultivated the Trust’s alumni network, to open up new opportunities for current and prospective beneficiaries. And she put resources into building an evidence base showing the positive impacts of the charity’s work.

That work is based on some core principles: that all young people should be able to receive all the education, training and support they need to reach their potential; that everyone should have an opportunity to progress in their career based on their skills and abilities, not their background; and that all senior managers should reflect the diversity within society.

“Today, the organisation connects talent with opportunity,” says Watson. In addition to helping young people from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds pursue careers in the built environment industries, through work experience, mentoring and financial support for higher and further education, the Trust now also offers support to young people who aspire to work in other professions.

It also seeks to boost diversity in workforces, in part through a partnership with recruitment company Urban, to help talented individuals from under-represented groups build careers in the professions. A social enterprise arm, Stephen Lawrence Consulting, helps organisations increase positive social impacts, including via implementation of diversity recruitment strategies and community engagement activities.

By early 2020 Watson and her colleagues had also built a network of more than 80 corporate supporters, some of which have donated valuable pro bono services. In 2017/2018, international architecture firm Gensler completed a pro bono project worth approximately £1 million to complete a refurbishment project at the Trust’s Stephen Lawrence Centre, in Deptford, south London, after Watson flew to the US to make her case directly to the company’s president. “That was a big achievement!” she says, proudly. The Centre now incorporates co-working and office space for start-ups and small businesses, bringing the Trust additional income.

Hit by covid-19

Like every other charity, the Trust was adversely affected by the Covid-19 crisis, with seven of its 10 staff furloughed. Despite this, in April 2020, the Trust led and coordinated the first National Stephen Lawrence Day, an initiative announced in 2018 by the then Prime Minister Theresa May, intended to inspire community activities aimed at creating a more inclusive society. Watson and her colleagues had met with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust when planning how the day would work, as the day is intended to fulfil a similar purpose:
educating as many people as possible from the age of five upwards about a terrible event – and the good that can come from remembering it.

Then, in May 2020, the death of George Floyd in the US sparked protests all over the world and energised the Black Lives Matter movement. Watson hopes the events of 2020 really will lead to lasting positive change, if the coalition of people of all ages and from every part of society who supported the protests holds together.

“There is a need to differentiate between supporting a cause and changes we can make in society that will stick,” she says. “That is the big difference that this particular tragedy could bring about.”

She thinks the involvement of young people has been particularly powerful. “There was a lack of understanding among young people as to how or why something like this was happening again,” she says. “And about young people who are not from minority backgrounds not understanding why some of their friends are not treated the same as they are.”

Another consequence of these events has been an increased willingness among many UK businesses, organisations and institutions to support anti-racism and pro-diversity initiatives and organisations. Many firms have “thrown their old CSR rules out of the window” in order
to give more support to organisations seeking to support minority communities, says Watson.

Onwards and upwards

Remarkably, the Trust has been able to form more than 200 new corporate partnerships during the past few months. Companies that have named the Trust as a charity of the year include Marks & Spencer, Audible, Deloitte and Waitrose.

The number of individual donors has also risen, to more than 6,500. Watson insists on sending thank you letters to every donor, however small their donation might have been. “I have a very strict rule that I thank everybody, because the £5 may have been harder to come by than the £10,000.”

The extra income will help to fund new projects and services, including a digital platform through which young people will be able to find and book work experience opportunities; and/or to apply for bursaries or scholarships. All the Trust’s staff have been brought back out of furlough, and it is now recruiting for new roles, aiming to double in size to around 20 employees.

“We’ll still be a small charity, but this is a game-changer,” says Watson. “Now that we have relationships with companies like Google and Audible, we’ll be building programmes that are available digitally, making us truly national, meaning we can work to help more people from ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups.”

Watson says she started working at the Trust with the aim of securing its future and so far she feels that she is succeeding. “I’ve basically applied some corporate discipline to a charity, while trying to honour Stephen’s legacy,” she says. “That’s why we do what we do.
My strategic goal for the Trust is that it’s there forever.”

She is not complacent about the future. She thinks the piecemeal way most charities are funded is the sector’s greatest weakness. “They are funded for very short periods of time and the hoops they need to go through to get funding are ever more challenging,” she says.
Considering the sector more broadly, the other change Watson would like to see would be an increase in diversity within leadership positions in the sector. “I thought, coming from a corporate background, where I was used to being the only one, that it would be different in this sector – but it’s not,” she says. “Black voices are not heard and support for black and minority ethnic people moving through the sector is pretty non-existent, because we are not at the table.”

Outside work, she enjoys family life in south London, with her husband David, a former headteacher and now an education adviser for Southwark Council; and her two daughters, Isabella and Gabriella, who are 19 and 16. She has maintained her enthusiasm for sport and keeping fit and also enjoys reading thrillers – she says she is fascinated by why some people do bad things – perhaps because she is the opposite sort of person, who is always trying to see what else they might be able to do that would be useful; and how they might motivate others to join in.

The commitment young people from her daughters’ generation have shown to the BLM movement gives Watson some hope that the events of 2020 could lead to lasting positive change. But she still remains painfully aware of the need for charities like the Trust: to ensure that in future young people from ethnic minorities or deprived backgrounds are not denied opportunities because of where they have come from, do not have to work twice as hard as other people – and have the chance to try to achieve their ambitions; the chance that Stephen Lawrence never had.

But she is also optimistic because – thanks in part to the campaigning of Baroness Lawrence and Stephen’s family, to the Trust and others – the UK is a different place today to the country it was in the early 1990s.

“Society has changed,” she says. “It feels much more ready for action than it was, historically. “After Stephen’s murder it took a long time and a lot of institutional soul-searching before anything changed. But this time we have all stood together, because the change we need has to be made by all of us together. That’s the difference.” ■

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