Mentorship and educational reform are the key tools for changing the black society.
These are the sentiments of British-born Barbadian, Sayce Holmes-Lewis, founder and CEO of Mentivity; a London-based mentoring organization and alternative educational provision which refocuses and reforms education to rehabilitate young people into society.
Holmes-Lewis recently sat down with Loop News after making a donation to football clubs Kickstart Rush and Wotton FC on behalf of his organization.
Born in South London to a Barbadian father and Jamaican mother, Holmes-Lewis sees himself as 100 per cent West Indian and from his time as a boy till now, he said he has seen a lot of the Afro-Caribbean youths struggling because of the colonialized aspect of education.
“I think we need a more Afrocentric education system. We need that globally because Eurocentric education is allowing our young people to become victims of the system. You look at a television and a car 70 years ago, its changed but education hasn’t. My son is still studying the same books in English I did 22 years ago. We are not making any progress. They shouldn’t be learning about Shakespeare or all of those other type of books. Why aren’t they learning about our natives, Stormzy’s autobiography, things that they can reflect and actually identify with? My thing is to get the Government to change education, decolonized education and make it more inclusive for our black boys and girls of African and Caribbean descent."
Despite its short tenure of operations, within its five years, Mentivity has impacted a number of schools, professional football clubs, youth clubs and even government and non-governmental agencies such as Goldman Sachs via their mentoring programme.
According to Holmes-Lewis, mentoring occurs every day and everywhere, from the home to the workplace, even on the football pitch and his organization is trying to professionalize mentoring and show the importance of it but also to provide sustained investment in young people.
Initially, the majority of those young people were sportsmen, who were from at at-risk areas such as the South-East London district which boast of England internationals Reiss Nelson and Jadon Sancho, as well as former Liverpool star Jordan Ibe, all of who were coached and mentored by Holmes-Lewis.
“That football mentoring is very key, especially in South-East London because a lot of the boys have the talent but don’t have the mindset in order to progress. They sometimes don’t have that support in the home or within the society”, explained Holmes-Lewis.
Holmes-Lewis believes his institution’s philosophy is relevant to any Caribbean society and someday hopes to extend their services to Barbados due to his roots, and also across the Caribbean.
With the Black Lives Matter movement significantly affecting England earlier this year, Holmes-Lewis was not exempted from some of the dark realities of it, as he was stopped, searched and harassed while on the job.
He said he was accustomed to the police bullying in his area. From the time he was 14 years old, he was stopped, handcuffed and beaten after walking home from school. An act which went unpunished by the judicial system due to insufficient evidence, but Holmes-Lewis was charged for assaulting an officer.
However, the father of 14-year-old Kamron, said enough was enough and broadcasted the stop and search experience across social media.
“I’ve been stopped and searched over 30 times from the age of 14 and I got stopped during lockdown while delivering food to friends who lost family members to COVID-19. I just decided I needed to find a solution, so I filmed it on Instagram Live, put it on Twitter and it went viral. I spoke to counselors, politicians within the community and within six weeks I launched a programme with the Met Police at the new Scotland Yard Headquarters. So now I’m actually running the training programme for 500 officers.”
Holmes-Lewis said young people just need to believe in themselves while understanding what the world is and to understand that there is social mobility, there is progression but only through hard work and education.
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