Last weekend, we attended the Black Women’s Conference. This is an annual event organised by The Black Women’s Forum that  aims to provide a safe space to share, empower and engage with women of African,  Asian, Arab and Caribbean descent living in the UK. It provides a forum for open, honest discussion on issues affecting black women.

This year’s conference was the fifth anniversary of the event and the theme of the conference was ‘Celebrating the Achievements of Women of Colour.’ The  program included panel discussions in the morning followed by workshops in the afternoon.

The panel discussions consisted of speakers from a variety of fields with the first panel focusing on black women in the creative and education industry and the second panel focused on black women in sports and business.  You can find out about all the speakers here

We were really inspired by all the speakers who took part in the panel discussions  and it was interesting to note that the message of the importance of our health and wellbeing was a theme that recurred in almost every presentation.

Black women in the business world face a lot of barriers and challenges which were clearly illustrated by the speakers as they shared their stories of racism and sexism. This core barrier of racism has led to loss of opportunity, difficulties in securing investment, daily battles with “the system”, lack of career progression and so much more.  Fighting these inequalities every single day is tough, affects our wellbeing and can thus impact both our physical and mental health.

We applaud the honesty of Imriel Morgan, the Chief Executive of the Shout Out Network and co-host of Melanin Millennials who spoke with passion about the pioneering work that she’s doing in the podcasting world and the challenges she has faced. This has included difficulties getting her podcast onto well-known platforms which lack diversity and seem not to embrace black podcasts and organising the first ever black podcasting festival. Imriel spoke of the frustrations of not being able to access investment despite being an award-winning podcast and then very movingly tried to fight back tears as she told us that being a black female Chief Executive is really tough. Imriel opened up and was very honest about her experience with depression saying “the struggle is real” and spoke about being on anti-depressants.

We have to do something about this. We have to make sure that black business women have all the support that they need to fight these battles and get through them with their physical and mental health intact. One solution that was discussed throughout the day was the need for black women to come together to form supportive networks so that women have a support system and don’t feel alone in the corporate world.

We feel there is much to do in this area and will explore what we can do as a charity to support black business women.