Making a fairer city with Peaches Golding…
Peaches Golding, OBE and Lord Lieutenant of Bristol, the King’s representative in the county of Bristol, came to speak to us about her role and the role businesses can play in transforming the wider community.
In each of the 98 counties in the UK and Northern Ireland, the King has two appointments, Lord Lieutenant and High Sheriff, the oldest in the country. Both of these unpaid roles offer the opportunity to serve and make links between communities and royal activities. Peaches Golding is the first black woman to have held either of these offices for Bristol and now she has done both (at different times). For Peaches, making links between communities and royal activities has involved a lot of work encouraging people who are at risk of becoming marginalised and helping them to fit back into society.
Peaches started as a zoologist in North Carolina. As a child, in the garden of her Great Uncle Sherman who kept bees and two huge ponds full of Shubunkin fish, Peaches was inspired by a love of the natural world, and, with an encouraging mother who was a teacher, zoology was an easy route in life to take.
Peaches’ father was a university professor whose curiosity and intelligent approach to life meant that there was never a dull moment. A stream of students from all over the world came into their home, including an African university student, Thaddeus, who called their house his home in the holidays. Thaddeus became to her like an inspirational elder brother and when she graduated from university she decided to go to West Africa. Here she met her husband, Bob, who was a director of a zoo. Over the next sixteen years, and by the time they left Africa in 1980, he had established the largest public amenity in West Africa and had hand-grown a family of gorillas whose mothers had been killed. The couple came to London where Bob became an executive director at Chessington Zoo. From there, he moved on to the Cotswold Wildlife Park where he built a tropical house and various other animal accommodation. The family then decided to move to Bristol.
Peaches worked at Bristol City Council in economic development, where one of her responsibilities was to look after cooperatives and smaller businesses and also to help out with some larger projects and intiatives. At this time, all sorts of interesting things were taking place in Bristol such as Lloyds Bank moving part of its business out of London into Bristol, Hewlett Packard setting up their research labs in Bristol and Dupont also coming in.
Peaches came into contact with an organisation called Business in the Community where she started working with companies to explore the positive things that they could do other than employing people. It was here, in a space working to create a fairer and more just society, she felt at her most effective and she has pursued this objective, in whatever role she has held, for the past thirty years.
Closing the inequality gap was a complex issue
She discovered that the most important key to change was for young people to feel as if they were a part of society and that their skills and interests were important and recognised. The more youth clubs, playgrounds and activities for young people disappeared, the more the wrong type of message became ingrained into the next generation. Society must value young people, and enable them to examine their potential and fulfil it, wherever they come from, economically or geographcally. Educators need to be very clear about how they release the potential of young people as it’s very easy to put someone off but also very easy to encourage them to do something extraordinary.
Peaches is a great advocate of helping people to see the world from the shoes of another. She took business leaders into prisons where they had the opportunity to meet people who were able to help them to understand what in their lives had led them on a path to prison. Then they explored what businesses could do alongside people in prison so that when they come out the other side they can be part of society again, provided with job ready skills, and properly rehabilitated.
In order for businesses to improve their social impact, Peaches likes to promote the idea of mentors and the idea of reverse mentors even more! Business leaders may have people in their businesses whose lives they know very little about. However, these people may have great ideas and great capabilities which are being missed. Reverse mentoring enables businesses to identify from a grass roots level the things that would reduce churn, help staff to progress, uncover ideas for a product or a service, or even look at an entirely different marketplace. IBM did exactly this when they realise that they didn’t have a lot of dealers in black communities. Consequently they grew the marketplace, made a lot of sales, recouped market share and spawned businesses. British Gas also went into prisons and on discovering the cost of keeping someone in prison, they decided to find out who in prison might want to participate in training schemes to ready them to enter the gas industry on release.
Peaches sees Bristol as a truly great place to do business with its broad economy, port, airport, motorway access, universities, training colleges, performing arts, fine arts, computer technologies, digital communities and places for businesses to grow. It shouldn’t be the case that young people grow up in the city feeling somehow distant or separated from all the exciting opportunities that are available.
How can a business reach out and make our city a better place?
This is a question that we have tried to answer through our activities working in recruitment in finance and it was interesting to hear Peaches’ answer to it. She told us that one of the best things to do is to meet, mix and mingle and try to understand people who are different from ourselves. Doing so broadens our horizons and makes us more likely to take up the challenge to use our businesses to create a more united and unified society. We couldn’t agree more.
So, how does Core3 combine changing our city with recruitment in finance?
It’s easy to focus purely on what’s coming in at the end of the month, but there are always untapped opportunities that exist that could make our business better. Future improvements in the sector might come through a young person who simply needs to be allowed to fulfil their potential. For us, the world of recruitment in finance might be turned on its head with new tech or a new idea and, as we speak, some young hopeful needs help to bring their idea to the marketplace. We can be involved in the giving of that help, even in a small or indirect way, which is why we partner with Babbasa, an organisation that works with young people in Bristol to help them see their dreams come to life.
Learn more today at: www.core3.co.uk/purpose
