Honouring Our Communities

Honouring Those We Have Lost. Celebrating Those Still Building. Preserving The Stories Future Generations Need To Hear.

October is here and this year’s Black History Month theme is 'Honouring Our Communities.' It asks us to look beyond the famous names to the people and everyday networks that have shaped and sustained British life. Think of the nurse on the night shift, the elder who keeps the church hall open, the entrepreneur who creates jobs on the high street or the promoter who gives young talent a stage. They are history too and they are making it right now.

There is, however, a harder question sitting behind the celebrations. "What happens to everything a generation has built when the people who built it are no longer here?"

We tend to think about legacy retrospectively.

Through a name on a building, an obituary, an archive or a photograph pulled from a drawer when somebody dies. Yet the most consequential forms of legacy are often less visible. They can be found in the house somebody managed to buy, the business that employed other families, the introduction that changed a career, the organisation that survived its founder, or the knowledge one generation deliberately transferred to another.

Perhaps legacy is not simply what we leave behind. It is what continues to create possibility because we were here.

Where It Began

Black History Month UK started here, not as an import. It was launched in London in 1987 by Ghanaian-born activist Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, with support from the Greater London Council and community organisations. This year also marks a centenary because it is 100 years since historian Carter G. Woodson and the organisation now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History established Negro History Week in the United States in 1926, laying foundations for what would eventually become Black History Month there.

The dates matter, but something else about that history matters more. Neither initiative began because history naturally makes room for everybody. They began because people recognised that important stories were being overlooked and decided to create the structures through which those stories could survive.

History, after all, does not preserve itself.

The Campaigners Who Kept the Flame Lit

Long before “Windrush” became a national headline, people were already doing the work of protecting its memory.

Sam King travelled to Britain on the Empire Windrush after serving in the RAF and later became the first Black Mayor of Southwark. He organised a Windrush commemorative event in 1968 for the 20th anniversary and continued bringing passengers together for later anniversaries. He is also credited by the Windrush Foundation with first using the term “Windrush Generation.”

In 1996, Sam King MBE and Arthur Torrington CBE founded the Windrush Foundation to preserve the memories and contribution of the Caribbean men and women who helped rebuild post-war Britain. King died in 2016, aged 90. Torrington continues that work, while the Foundation describes its contribution as helping to create a platform upon which other Windrush organisations and initiatives subsequently developed.

There is something important in that progression. King and Torrington did not merely remember an experience they had lived through. They built something around the memory so that people who had never stood on the deck of the Empire Windrush could understand what that generation had contributed.

Today, remembering Windrush also means confronting unfinished business. Windrush Commissioner Reverend Clive Foster has told the Government that many victims continue to experience the compensation scheme as opaque and unjust and has called for reform given the age and health of survivors. There is an uncomfortable contradiction in celebrating a generation historically while members of that generation are still seeking justice in the present.

Honouring people cannot begin once they become history.

The Economic History We Rarely Call History

There is another inheritance from that generation that receives considerably less attention during Black History Month because it happened around kitchen tables.

Across Caribbean communities, Pardner helped people save collectively at a time when access to mainstream financial institutions, credit and capital would be difficult. Similar rotating savings traditions have existed across African and other diaspora communities under different names. People contributed regularly to a shared pool, each participant receiving the accumulated sum when their turn came.

It sounds simple until we consider what those turns sometimes financed.

A deposit on a house. Stock for a shop. Equipment for a business. School or university fees. A car needed for work. The first meaningful piece of financial security a family had possessed in Britain.

Pardner is sometimes remembered almost nostalgically, as something our parents or grandparents did before financial services became more accessible. That may underestimate what was actually happening. People with relatively modest individual resources had created a mechanism based on trust, reciprocity, discipline and pooled capital. When conventional systems did not always work for them, they developed another way of getting things done.

Some of the homes and businesses created through that economic ingenuity are still with us. Their value may be considerably greater than anything the original contributors could have imagined.

Which creates a different question for this generation “we learned how to pool money when we had very little of it. What have we learned about pooling wealth now that some of us have considerably more?”

That is not an argument for abandoning the principles behind Pardner. It may be an argument for taking those principles more seriously.

A generation that once pooled wages to acquire individual assets has helped produce subsequent generations of homeowners, senior professionals, entrepreneurs, executives and people with pensions, investments, property equity, commercial experience and influential networks. The circumstances have changed. The underlying instinct for collective economic action does not necessarily have to.

The Economic History We Rarely Call History

There is another inheritance from that generation that receives considerably less attention during Black History Month. It happened around kitchen tables.

Across Caribbean communities, Pardner helped people save collectively at a time when access to mainstream financial institutions, credit and capital would be difficult. Similar rotating savings traditions have existed across African and other diaspora communities under different names. People contributed regularly to a shared pool, each participant receiving the accumulated sum when their turn came. What appeared to be a simple savings arrangement was often doing something far more consequential: providing access to capital.

Those turns helped finance deposits on homes, stock for shops, equipment for businesses, education and the first meaningful pieces of financial security some families had been able to establish in Britain. 

Pardner is sometimes remembered nostalgically, as something our parents or grandparents did before financial services became more accessible. That interpretation risks underestimating its economic sophistication. People with relatively modest individual resources had created a mechanism built on trust, reciprocity, discipline and pooled capital. When conventional systems did not always work for them, they developed another way of getting things done.

Some of the homes and businesses created through that ingenuity are still with us and their value may be considerably greater than anything the original contributors could have imagined. Yet that success creates a different question for the generations that inherited it.

“We learned how to pool money when we had very little of it, what have we learned about pooling wealth now that some of us have considerably more?”

The question becomes more urgent when we look at what has happened to Black entrepreneurship. GEM research continues to show the strength of entrepreneurial activity among women, immigrants and non-white ethnic communities in Britain, while British Business Bank research suggests that aspiration itself is not the principal problem. 

Its 2026 findings show that 71% of ethnic-minority-led businesses want to become significantly larger, compared with 40% of White-led businesses and 52% are willing to use finance to grow, compared with 35%, yet more than half anticipate difficulties accessing that finance. The Bank's wider work on venture capital has also documented the persistent under-representation of Black and female founders within equity investment.

Dr Carlton Brown's research through Aspire Consultancy brings another dimension to those numbers. His work on Black African and Caribbean diaspora entrepreneurship describes what he calls the “Race Paradox”: strong entrepreneurial propensity existing alongside structural constraints involving finance, social capital, networks and access to opportunity. More recent findings associated with the UK Black Business Entrepreneur Report 2026 continue to point towards finance and access to influential networks as significant obstacles for Black business owners.

Taken together, the picture is more complicated than the familiar call for more Black people to become entrepreneurs. We are already producing entrepreneurs. The harder question is what happens after they start. 

Too many potentially viable businesses encounter a point at which personal savings, family support and the founder's own resources are no longer enough, while the external capital capable of accelerating growth remains considerably harder to reach. The problem therefore moves from entrepreneurship to scale and from encouraging business creation to examining the financial architecture surrounding business growth.

That distinction matters because the answer cannot be to absolve banks, venture-capital firms, investors and financial institutions of their responsibility to address unequal access to finance. If structural barriers exist within mainstream capital markets, those barriers must be confronted. Community capital should not become an excuse for institutional failure.

But neither should institutional failure prevent us from asking what more might be possible with the assets, expertise and relationships now present within Black communities.

If Pardner once enabled people with limited individual resources to combine their capital to acquire homes, educate families and establish businesses, perhaps its evolution could help address a different challenge.  Maybe it is time to move viable Black-owned businesses from survival and start-up towards serious scale. 

Properly governed investment clubs, angel networks, syndicates and other investment structures could potentially combine financial capital with something equally valuable, the commercial judgement, professional expertise and networks of people who have already built businesses, acquired assets and reached senior positions.

The principle would not be entirely new and that is precisely what makes it interesting. 

Earlier generations understood that individually they might not possess enough capital at the moment they needed it, but collectively they could alter what was possible. The economic circumstances have changed, the intelligence behind the model has not.

Perhaps the next chapter is therefore not about replacing Pardner, but extending the principle behind it, From pooling income to acquiring assets, from assets to investment and from investment to businesses capable of reaching a scale that individual savings alone could never finance.

The ambition is not simply to create more Black-owned businesses. It is to ask whether we can build more of the capital, relationships and institutions that allow the strongest of those businesses to become substantial ones and, eventually, whether the wealth they create can finance the businesses, institutions and opportunities that come after them.

When access to growth finance remained uneven, our grandparents understood pooling. The question now is whether we have been ambitious enough about what could now be pooled.

Celebrating Those Still Building

Today, the work continues in classrooms, workplaces, businesses and communities.

In education, campaigners such as The Black Curriculum continue pressing a deceptively simple point. No history should be boxed into one month. The Government has said the reformed national curriculum will better reflect the diversity of British history, including Black British and Asian history. The detail will determine whether that promise changes what children actually encounter in classrooms.

There is another dimension worth considering. Black history cannot only be a history of what happened to Black people. Future generations also need to understand what Black people built. Businesses, organisations, intellectual movements, technologies, cultural industries, professional networks and financial traditions. Resistance matters, but so does agency.

The same principle applies in workplaces. Large employers are moving towards greater scrutiny of ethnicity pay disparities, creating an opportunity to examine whether inclusion is reflected not merely in recruitment but in progression, seniority, reward and influence. Representation tells us who entered the organisation. It does not necessarily tell us who accumulated power once they got there.

Across our communities, organisations continue the quieter work of preservation and creation. The Black Cultural Archives in Brixton safeguards material that future generations will use to understand Black British life, while local initiatives across the country continue creating spaces around identity, wellbeing, enterprise, leadership and culture.

Perhaps one of the habits Black History Month can help us change is our tendency to understand the full significance of someone's contribution only after we lose them. There are people building institutions, businesses, archives and communities now whose work deserves attention while they are still able to tell us what it took to build them.

Honouring Those We Have Lost This Year

This year we have lost people whose lives reveal very different ways in which something can continue beyond the person who created it.

Kanya King CBE, founder of the MOBO Awards, remortgaged her home in 1996 when industry backing was difficult to secure and built a platform that changed the visibility of Music of Black Origin in Britain. What began as an entrepreneurial risk became part of Britain's cultural infrastructure. Her achievement was the organisation she built, the more interesting legacy may be the careers, audiences and commercial possibilities that became easier to imagine because it existed.

Sway DaSafo, the pioneering British-Ghanaian rapper, demonstrated another route. As an independent artist he became the first unsigned artist to win a MOBO for Best Hip-Hop Act in 2005 and subsequently used his Dcypha platform to support emerging talent. The significance lies not only in getting through the door, but in what someone chooses to do once it opens.

Ralph Ottey, the Jamaican-born RAF veteran who served with 617 “Dambusters” Squadron, settled in Boston, Lincolnshire and became part of the civic life of the town. His story also survives through oral-history interviews. A voice recorded becomes something different from a memory passed from one person to another. Future generations can encounter the individual rather than merely read what somebody else decided was important about him.

Eric Huntley, the Guyanese-born publisher and organiser who, with Jessica Huntley, co-founded Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, understood another dimension of preservation. They did not simply argue that Black writers deserved to be heard, they helped create a mechanism through which those writers could reach readers. Their publishing work championed figures including Walter Rodney, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Beryl Gilroy and Valerie Bloom, while their papers are now preserved for future generations.

DJ Buxley, Ehi Oboite, represented a younger generation of cultural entrepreneurship. Through Boxout Fest he created a platform for Afrobeats and Dancehall in Birmingham that attracted thousands of people. His death at just 34 is a reminder that legacy is not necessarily measured by longevity. Sometimes it is visible in what somebody manages to set in motion.

Different generations, different industries and very different lives, yet there is a thread running between them. Each created something that extended beyond personal achievement.

When Success Becomes Stewardship

That distinction becomes more important as Black Britain itself changes.

For earlier generations, acquiring a home could represent an extraordinary breakthrough.

Establishing a viable business could alter the prospects of an entire family. Entering medicine, law, academia, corporate leadership or public life could mean crossing a threshold nobody in the family had crossed before. Those achievements should never be diminished by hindsight.

But success changes the questions available to the generation that follows because the real test begins when personal achievement has to outlive the person who created it. 

Property may provide security for one generation, but without the knowledge and structures to protect, develop and transfer it, an appreciating asset can become a diminishing inheritance. The same vulnerability exists inside businesses that remain inseparable from their founders and professional networks whose value disappears at retirement because access was accumulated but never transferred. 

Even the expensive judgement acquired through decades of entrepreneurship can vanish when nobody captures how decisions were made, relationships built, capital raised or failure survived. Seen this way, succession is about considerably more than inheritance: it is the deliberate transfer of economic value, knowledge, access and judgement so that the next generation begins with accumulated advantage rather than having to reconstruct it.

This is where the conversation about mentoring may need to become more ambitious. Advice is valuable, but businesses also require customers, contracts, introductions, investment and patient capital. The next evolution of community support may therefore involve asking not simply how successful people can mentor emerging entrepreneurs, but how accumulated experience, networks and wealth can participate in their growth.

There is an important distinction between owning assets and building an economic ecosystem. One creates security. The other can create momentum.

Black Philanthropy and the Institutions We Want to Survive

The same evolution applies to giving.

Black communities have always been philanthropic, although we have not necessarily used that language to describe what was happening. Money has moved between relatives, churches, community organisations and countries for generations. People have paid school fees, supported funerals, sponsored young people, helped relatives establish businesses and sent remittances home. Much of that giving has been informal, private and deeply relational.

The question is not whether Black communities know how to give. The question is what might become possible if some of that generosity becomes more intentional about permanence.

A scholarship can change one life. An endowed scholarship can continue changing lives after its founder is gone. A donation can keep an organisation operating this month. Long-term philanthropic capital can allow an institution to plan years ahead. A successful entrepreneur can support another founder informally, while a network of successful entrepreneurs may eventually have the capacity to invest in a generation of businesses.

This is where philanthropy becomes part of the legacy conversation rather than something separate from it, because the institutions a community says it values cannot survive indefinitely on admiration, voluntary effort or intermittent generosity. Archives require preservation, independent organisations need the financial resilience to plan beyond the next funding cycle, researchers need resources to produce new knowledge, and emerging entrepreneurs and leaders need institutions capable of investing in their development long before the return is obvious. 

The more mature question, therefore, is not simply how much Black communities give, but whether a greater proportion of accumulated wealth can be organised deliberately around the things we want to remain possible when the original founders, donors and community activists are no longer there to sustain them.

Preserving the Stories Future Generations Need to Hear

The Huntleys' papers survived because somebody understood that they were worth keeping. 

Ralph Ottey's voice survives because somebody recorded it. Windrush history survives because people such as Sam King and Arthur Torrington understood that memory needed organisation around it.

There is another kind of archive we should consider creating.

We should know how our businesses were financed, how the first houses were bought, how entrepreneurs found their first customers, how professionals navigated institutions that were not designed with them in mind and how families moved from survival to security. We should know which decisions created wealth, which destroyed it and what happened when businesses passed from one generation to another.

Those are not merely family anecdotes. They are economic knowledge.

Perhaps that is one of the things Black History Month can become at its best. Not simply a month in which we look backwards, but a moment when we become more deliberate about what the future will be able to learn from us.

The generation that came before us did not necessarily use words such as “portfolio”, “ecosystem” or “intergenerational wealth”. Some simply knew that if twelve people put something into the Pardner every week, eventually each person would have access to a sum they could not easily have accumulated alone.

There was intelligence, trust and architecture in that.

The question facing those of us who inherited the houses, businesses, qualifications, networks, institutions and opportunities created through those sacrifices is not whether we honour them. Of course we should. The harder question is whether “we know how to compound what they made possible” and ultimately could this be the difference between remembering history and extending it.

Honouring those we have lost. Celebrating those still building. Preserving the stories future generations need to hear and building something worthy of their inheritance.

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Without a doubt, this year’s Black History Month theme, “Honouring Our Communities,” challenges us to look beyond individual achievement towards collective impact. It asks us to recognise not only those who made history, but the people whose everyday contribution helped shape modern Britain and, perhaps more importantly, to consider what we will do with the inheritance their sacrifices made possible. 

Honouring that legacy cannot end with remembering names or retelling stories, it must also be visible in what we preserve, what we build, what we finance and what we transfer. If one generation turned exclusion into enterprise, pooled modest incomes to acquire assets and created institutions where none existed, then extending that history means ensuring those gains do not simply survive us, but become the foundations from which another generation can build further.

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If this article has made you think differently about legacy, add your perspective in the comments section. What have previous generations made possible that we now have a responsibility to compound? 

Like and share this article so the conversation about Black history moves beyond what we remember to what we are prepared to build, finance, preserve and pass forward.