| Sukhvinder Kaur Stubbs |
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 Sukhvinder grew up in Handworth in Birmingham, having migrated from the Punjab when she was very young. Her father had come two years earlier and her mother and Sukhvinder joined him when she was about three. She did not go to school till she was nine because her parents came from a culture where they did not think girls needed to go to school and they were not aware of education procedures. When her older brother started school she was discovered and went to Westminster Road School. Reconstruction in the area and the building of a new flyover split the community and Sukhvinder lost all her fiends and had to go to Birchfield School. At Broadway secondary school she enjoyed the challenge of learning as a new world opened up for her. She had ambitions to go to University and studied the atlas to find out how far everywhere was from Birmingham. She ended up going to Oxford University where she studied Geography and was particularly interested in the human dimension of inequality, the quality and scope of cultures and the lives that people have around the world. At Oxford she felt somewhat alone as one of only a few black students, from a modest home background and a comprehensive school. This was not the norm. Upon leaving University she got a job as a graduate manager trainee but gave it up after six months as her heart was not in it. Instead she took a pay cut and joined the voluntary sector. She worked with many different people (children with learning difficulties, regeneration etc) home and aboard and was eventually appointed as Chief Executive at the Runnymede Trust the leading independent think tank on ethnicity and cultural diversity. She had now found her niche where her values and all of the things that she really believed in were actually connecting with what she was doing on a professional level. Having been unsuccessful in standing for a Parliamentary seat in Perry Barr she spent some time in Geneva helping with preparation for the World Conference on Racism to be held in Durban South Africa 2001. She returned to South Africa as part of the first Black Delegation their after the election that bought Nelson Mandela to power. Shortly afterwards she was appointed to the post of Chief Executive of the Barrow Cadbury Trust that supports innovative grass roots projects. She is a non-executive director on a number of public bodies and sits on a number of government task groups. |
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