We Are All Windrush Advisory Group

Meet the fantastic team working with Big Ideas to mark Windrush 75. Representing a broad range of experience from the army to the arts, the classroom to the newsroom. The WAAW Advisors are British Caribbean professionals passionate about Windrush and the positive impact of the British Caribbean community.  

Horace Barnes and the team at WAWI have been marking Windrush Day every year for fifteen years. “This is full steam ahead!” he says, “People are coming together more. People are understanding more. Education and bringing communities together is what we are about: we are all the Windrush generation.”

 “I straddle both sides,” says Orin Gordon, former editor of the BBC’s Caribbean service currently resident in Trinidad. “The contribution of people of Caribbean heritage to British life and culture has been immense. It’s interwoven, integrated and ingested to a point where it can be taken for granted. On the Caribbean side, I wonder if we are overlooking the Windrush generation. It’s time that we reminded ourselves of this, and reconnected with our heritage.”

Nessa Keddo Senior lecturer at the London College of Communication is a proud (grand)daughter of the Windrush generation with all four grandparents Jamaican born. “Windrush75 marks a momentous occasion. For many, this schools’ day will give children who live within diverse communities a chance to hear about the experiences of their ancestors or the backgrounds of their peers for the first time.”

Head teacher Andrea Silvain is amongst the 1% of Black British Head teachers. Her parents immigrated from Jamaica and St Lucia during the 1960s and worked as a nurse in the NHS and a bus driver. Andi says, “Windrush is all our history – let’s give every child a chance to understand how their society was made.”

Arthur Torrington, co-founder of the Windrush Foundation and the Equiano Society, has deep roots in community activism. “Windrush75 is an opportunity to explore the experience of arrival, settling and making a contribution. The day of digital events for schools across the country is a good idea, I have to say, it will help younger people to understand and bring the relevance of this special day to everyone who has a heritage of travelling whether it’s from the Caribbean, Pakistan or from across Africa.”

Image credit: Hatchling25, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons