When OYA was founded in 2000, we believed our young people needed

• Excellent academic qualifications in a society where Black people need to be ‘twice as good’

• A sense of identity and belonging to help them to resist the temptations of the gangs-drugs-crime culture which beckoned to them daily from London streets

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Twenty years on, what has changed?

Our current young people are 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants, more ‘integrated’ - at least superficially – into ‘mainstream’ culture than our young people in 2000, often ‘fresh off the boat’.

But

• Discrimination against Black people in Britain has not gone away. Black people still have to be twice as good to get half as far.

• Black kids are still at the bottom of the school league tables.

• The gang-drugs-and-knife culture goes on and on and on.

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So what do we our young people need, growing up in 21st century Britain?

They need to:

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• realise now rather than later that good qualifications mean hard, consistent work

• think about their future, not be constantly wired into a world of social media trivia

• respect themselves, their peers, their teachers, their parents

• embrace the positive values in both their heritages – African and British – and resist the negative influences of a 21st century urban environment

• have a clear, critical grasp of Africa’s relationship to Britain through history and into the present

• be hungry for knowledge about the world – history, geography, economics, politics – and eager to find out how the pieces fit together

• think for themselves, question what they are told and what they are taught

• be leaders not followers, proactive not reactive

• navigate the digital world with maturity and use social media for positive purposes

• seek out and grasp the opportunities 21st century Britain offers

• give back to Britain, Africa, the world and make the world a better place.