The campaigner, Richard Taylor OBE, father of Damilola Taylor died on 23 March 2024. Following the senseless murder of his 10-year-old son Damilola, he, and his late wife Gloria, dedicated the rest of their lives to giving hope to deprived young people.

Through the Damilola Taylor Trust Richard developed and ran many programmes to help the development of inner-city youths. He ran events to celebrate the achievements of young people; he advised government at the highest level; he worked with other parents bereaved through knife crime; he visited schools to persuade young people that they could achieve whatever their background and he ran a lecture programme to publicise effective ways of dealing with problems like youth violence.

It's a marvellous legacy, but there are several strands that are unfinished. Richard and the Trust has a roll out of the Career Pathway Programmes for Schools almost ready to go and the Hope Collective, has an ever-increasing programme of outreach and involvement of young people planned. As trustees we would be so grateful for any contributions to allow this work to come to fruition.

Almost 25 years earlier on 27 November 2000 a young boy had finished studying in Peckham Library and was on his way home. He never arrived. He was discovered in a stairwell bleeding to death. He was l0 years old and his name was Damilola Taylor. Damilola's death became national news.

The tragic death of Damilola changed the course of the lives of his parents. The Police investigation was initially ineffective but eventually, after several trials and false starts, two brothers only a little older than Damilola were convicted for his manslaughter.

Damilola's father Richard and his wife, Gloria, founded the Damilola Taylor Trust in 2001 to try and make sure that some good came from their loss.

Over more than 20 years the Trust has worked so hard to bring hope to disadvantaged young people who have lost hope.

In the first ten years the trust implemented two major programmes. The first, the Extended Medical Degree Programme (EMDP), was created in 2002 in conjunction with Kings College Medical School. The EMDP programme still provides 25 funded places each year to give students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity to study medicine. Now in its 22nd year, EMDP has produced GPs and Junior Doctors for the NHS, though the Trust is no longer a major promoter.

The second main programme, the Spirit of London Awards (SOLA) was an annual awards ceremony that recognised young people across London for their achievements in the arts, media, campaigning and education. SOLA, was staged for four years 2009-2012 and inspired over 20,000 young Londoners to make the right decisions in life and to become productive citizens.

Career Pathway Programmes

Through a conference on combating knife crime and radicalisation that the Trust hosted in 2015, we found that low achievement, unequal access to opportunities and inadequate support precipitates a vicious circle of social isolation and a pathway to a life of crime and gangs for young people. For young people in inner-cities, the transition from formal education to the world of work is not automatic. Since 2016, we have been delivering Career Pathway Programmes (CPP) to support young people by providing them with pathways to meaningful careers in areas that they often had not considered open to them. We have run CPPs: in accountancy and business, medicine and the health sciences and Work in the City of London. Through CPPs and our Career Search and Skills Development (CSSD) programme we have supported 350 young people to improve their employability skills, connect to jobs and have access to enhanced economic opportunities. Click the link below to see clips of the CSSD programme. https://youtu.be/VZaixPftZ2I programme.

Once we realised that young people were beginning to go off the rails at a younger and younger age, we successfully adapted the CPP for delivery to children in schools: our Career Pathway Programmes for Schools (CPPFS). Initially we partnered with two schools, one in Peckham and the other in Crystal Palace, and despite many difficulties during lockdown, we ran the programme three years from 2020 to 2022. We worked with 120 pupils who had been identified as hard to reach/engage with and looked to stimulate them through mentoring and collaborative workshops into professional career pathways. Participants attended interactive issue-based workshops once a week for 12 weeks. The Career Pathway Programmes for Schools included group mentoring activities, tours of business organisations such as Shell Plc and Norton Rose Fulbright, as well as participation in social activities designed to develop social skills of the students. We have developed the CPPFS programme further and now plan to roll it out to many more schools.

Breakout session at the career insight trip to Norton Rose Fulbright CPPFS

Damilola Taylor Memorial lectures and the Hope Collective

We launched the Damilola Taylor Memorial Lectures (DTML), an advocacy activity in 2016, delivered it in 2017 as well as in 2018 to put the issues of knife crime and its devastating impact on the life chances of young inner-city youths on the public agenda. Our aim was to influence policy makers to enact better policies for protecting the youth.

Panel of experts at DTML 2018

DTMLs evolved into the Hope Collective in 2020, a special partnership that includes all violence reduction units (VRUs) and youth organisations such as UK Youth and National Citizens Services, the shared purpose of which is to establish real change. A change that is hoped to free our most vulnerable communities from poverty, violence and discrimination.

In that year, we also established the Damilola Taylor Youth Board, comprising of 8 young people to represent the needs and ideas of young people (YP) in programme development at the trust.

For nearly a quarter of a century the trust, under Mr. Taylor's leadership, has developed a wide range of initiatives. He was the driving force as it has developed programmes to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into careers varying from medicine to the City. He used his contacts to arrange conferences to draw together community leaders to hear nationally recognised speakers as well as grassroots workers talk about their solutions to key social problems of our day. Our programmes have plugged important gaps and have provided opportunities for young people to develop the wider social, personal and self-management skills required for productive participation and integration into society.

Mr. Taylor has been behind the trust's involvement in the Hope initiative, including the annual National Day of Hope on Damilola's birthday 7 December that the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, granted in 2021.

As trustees, we are so sad to have lost Richard, but so honoured to have known him. We are determined, in our turn, to carry on the work of the trust in the years ahead in the memory not only of Damilola Taylor but also Richard Taylor, OBE.

We are deeply concerned about the impact the cost-of-living crisis is having on the young people that we work with across the board. Like all charities, DTT relies on the generosity of the public donating money to support us so we continue our work. Please donate today to support the work of the Damilola Taylor Trust and help us keep the legacy of its founder, Mr. Richard Taylor, OBE going.

Our immediate priorities are to use donations to help roll out our Career Pathway Programmes for Schools (CPPFS) much more widely and to support the development of the Hope Collective in which members of Damilola Youth are playing a key part. There is more information about all our projects at: www.damilolataylortrust.co.uk. Thank you in advance for your contribution to this cause, which means so much to us!