“If I'm meant to do something, I can feel it in my bones”

What Steven asked Carol Stewart, Chair of Medway African Caribbean Association and Creative Medway.

Dr Carol Stewart has been a strong guiding influence in Medway through her involvement with several significant Medway community organisations, including the Medway African Caribbean Association, Creative Medway, and the Medway Place Board. Steven met with her at Chatham Dockyard, and they discussed those organisations, what brought Carol to Medway and the importance of diversity to communities.

Dr Carol Stewart (centre)

What are you the Chair of?
Crikey, what am I not the Chair of is probably an easier question to ask. I'm Chairperson of Medway African and Caribbean Association (MACA), Chairperson of Creative Medway, and a non-exec director for We Are Medway CIC, which was known as the Place Board. And I'm a company director of my own company.

As Chair of two different organisations, does one take precedence over the other?
So, because I've been Chair of MACA for a number of years now, that does take up quite the bulk of my time. I think it’s a very different infrastructure. It's not that one is more important than the other, they're all equally as important. Just that one takes a bit more of my time because we haven't got such a big infrastructure like we do with Creative Medway. With Creative Medway, we've got Vice Chairs as well. I don't have to do a lot of the hands-on stuff. We've got Imogen, who's fantastic, but there's a lot of coordinating and supporting us to achieve our objectives on a day-to-day basis. I manage to balance it quite well.

How did you become the Chair of MACA?
I moved to Kent 25 years ago from Wolverhampton. There was me, my now ex-husband and my two children. I've just got the one now, my daughter passed away ten years ago. We were introduced to MACA at that time because I'd always been involved in community organisations and doing voluntary work from about the age of seven, growing up in the Methodist Church in Wolverhampton. I was involved in the guides, the brownies. In Sunday school, I was a volunteer at a local children's home, and then I quickly got involved in doing work in the community as a teenager at my local youth club. Getting involved in chairing young people's groups, advocacy groups for young people, young people's rights.
It was a natural thing for me that when we moved here, with my children being like one of about half a dozen kids in their school that were black, that it was good to make those connections. I was introduced to MACA, and then, because I get very itchy feet, when you see something, you think, well, maybe they could do that differently because I had a lot of experience in chairing organisations. I was chairing health projects, I was a trustee for a cultural centre in Wolverhampton and I'm also a qualified social worker as well. I quickly got involved, and then after a few years, I got involved attending meetings and, some years later, was on the management committee, because it was a volunteer organisation at the time. I then eventually got elected as Chair. I think because I spoke the loudest! We had other chairs take over for a while which was nice, and then I got elected again in 2018 as Chair and have been there ever since. We've been trying to grow the organisation, trying to recruit more trustees.
My daughter and her friends started Young People United (YPU) in 2014. They got funding from Starbucks, and they got lots of support from Medway Council. We were the first ones to start a Saturday school that spoke about African and Caribbean culture. We started the Young Black Achievers Awards 19 years ago, so we were the first and only ones to do that. They started a dance group as well, Urban Steps. It kind of felt natural that they wanted this group of young people to do something that brought diverse groups of young people together. They started YPU in 2014, and they set up a talent show at Mid Kent College. It was great, and the late councillor Mike O'Brien just turned up out of the blue. He was the portfolio holder for children and young people at that time. We struck up this great friendship, I really, really miss Mike. He just turned up and said, ‘Oh, I'm really interested in what you're doing, can I have a chat?’ And he came to the launch event at the college, and he was a real strong supporter of MACA and our young people and we gave him a posthumous award as well. When my daughter died in 2015, the young people wanted to continue. They set up some awards in her name, diversity awards and inspirational awards. Now what they're doing is just phenomenal, they got a grant for nearly £300,000 to develop a youth program and also to help in our long-term vision for MACA. It's a long way of answering the question, but it shows there are various connections.

One thing from the African-Caribbean connection people will have heard of is Windrush. Does Medway have a connection to the Windrush generation?
I think it's an interesting term, and people talk about the Windrush generation because people that came over nearly 80 years ago came into England as a result of the short-term labour market post-Second World War, and we had the growth of the NHS. People came to this country from all over the diaspora, from Africa, from the Caribbean, from India. Not everyone came on the Windrush ship, but they're referred to as the Windrush generation. But I think it's important to understand that there's always been a presence of black communities, years, decades, centuries before the Windrush. In fact, black people were one of the first inhabitants of Great Britain, Cheddar Man. Not many people know that. Queen Victoria's great-great grandmother, she had African origins in her. Buckingham Palace was hers. There's always been a connection to Africa and the Caribbean here in Medway. What we're trying to do is to create more knowledge about those connections and about the contributions to the area.