Who We Are
UK Associates
Rt. Hon. David Lammy
UG Envoy Extraordinaire
Rt Hon David Lammy
UG Envoy Extraordinaire
David has been the Labour Member of Parliament for his home constituency of Tottenham since 2000, and in the 2017 General Election was re-elected for the sixth time with 82% of the vote.
David was born in Tottenham in 1972, one of five children raised by a single mother. David was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1994, practised as a barrister in England and the United States and became the first black Briton to study a Masters in Law at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997.
David was first elected as the Labour Member of Parliament for Tottenham in June 2000.
David served for 8 years (2002-10) as a Minister in the last Labour government, including as Culture Minister and Higher Education Minister, and was appointed to the Privy Council in 2008. As a Minister in the Department of Health David oversaw the introduction of four hour waiting times in Accident and Emergency Departments and as Minister of State for Higher Education and Skills established the Skills Funding Agency and the National Apprenticeship Service.
David is one of Parliament’s most prominent and successful campaigners for social justice. David led the campaign for Windrush British citizens to be granted British citizenship and paid compensation by the government, forcing the Home Secretary to guarantee the citizenship of Commonwealth nationals, set up a specialist Commonwealth Taskforce and establish a compensation scheme.
In Parliament, David had led a successful campaign for diversity to be included in the BBC’s Charter as a Public Purpose, with the BBC setting ambitious diversity targets. In 2016 David launched the Save Our Apprenticeships campaign, following a government announcement of up to 50% cuts in funding for young people in deprived areas, forcing the government into a u-turn, the introduction of a 20% payment for 16-18 year olds and a separate fund for disadvantaged areas. In 2016 David also led a successful cross-party campaign opposing the Government’s plans to privatise the Land Registry, resulting in Ministers dropping the plans and the Land Registry staying in public hands.
David has led a high-profile campaign calling on Oxbridge to improve access for students from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds. In May 2018 the University of Oxford announced a £150 million investment in its outreach programmes and committed to publishing annual admissions reports, and the University of Cambridge announced plans to introduce a foundation year. In March 2018 Comic Relief announced that it will end “white saviour” charity appeals, after pressure exerted by David’s campaign.
Since the Grenfell Tower fire David has been at the forefront of the fight for justice for the Grenfell families. David was the first Member of Parliament to challenge the gambling issue on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, launching the Stop The FOBTs campaign in 2013. In 2018 the government announced plans to cut the maximum stake on FOBTs to £2 per spin.
In January 2016, the then Prime Minister David Cameron asked David to lead an independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in our criminal justice system. The Lammy Review was published in September 2017, and included 35 wide-ranging policy recommendations for Government and the criminal justice sector. In April 2018 the Home Secretary asked David to join the Government’s Serious Violence Taskforce.
David is an Ambassador for Action Aid, President of the British and Foreign School Society and a Trustee of the National Youth Theatre as well as a Patron of a number of charities in Tottenham. He has spoken at the US Congress and Harvard University and is a Fellow of the University of Birkbeck, St John’s College, Durham and City Lit.
David is also the author of Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots, an analysis of the long-standing causes of the 2011 riots. David is a regular contributor to national newspapers and publications including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, New Statesman and others, and appears regularly on television and radio.
David lives in Haringey with his wife and three children.
Prof. David Dabydeen
Hon. Fellow University of Cambridge, and Director of the London- based Ameena Gafoor Institute
Prof David Dabydeen
David Dabydeen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick where he was teaching and researching from 1984 to 2019. He is the author of seven novels, three books of poems and many non-fiction works on Literary and Cultural studies. He is currently an Hon. Fellow at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, and Director of the London- based Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies. In 2008 he was awarded the Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence (Arts and Letters).
Guyana’s Ambassador to China (2010–2015)Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO( 1997; Founding member of the Ameena Gafoor Institute and and an internationally acclaimed novelist and poet.
Dr. Richard Drayton
Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London
Dr Richard Drayton
Richard Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and wrote his PhD at Yale. From 1992-4 he was Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine’s, Cambridge; 1994-8, Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford; and 1998-2001, Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. In 2001 he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History and Fellow of Corpus Christi, and from 2009, the sixth Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, EHESS in Paris, CUNY in New York, and FU Berlin, and held visiting fellowships at CASS in Beijing, Sydney, Munich, and FU in Berlin. In 2001 he won the Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association, in 2002 the Philip Leverhulme Prize, and in 2021 was awarded the Humboldt Prize in recognition of his “lifetime research achievements”. In 2016 he received the Barbados Jubilee Honour in recognition of his service to Barbados in the United Kingdom
Sir Trevor Phillips
Behavioral Scientist, Writer and TV producer, Hunan Rights Activists
Sir Trevor Phillips
OBE ARCS FIC
Trevor Phillips is a writer and television producer. He is the co-founder of the data analytics consultancy Webber Phillips, and Chairman of Green Park Interim and Executive Search. He is a Times columnist, shortlisted for Comment Writer of the Year in 2020.
He is the Chairman of the global freedom of expression campaign charity Index on Censorship; a Senior Fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank; and a Vice-President of the Royal Television Society.
Trevor is a non-executive director of the AIM-listed behavioural science consultancy Mind Gym; he was the President of the John Lewis Partnership Council until 2018, and founding chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Sir Clive Hubert Lloyd
Former Captain West Indies Cricket Team, Executive ICC
Dr. Raymond Backreedy
Chief Investment Manager FCA , UK
Dr Raymond Backreedy
Dr Backreedy is a Guyanese national (born and bred in Georgetown) who has been living and working between London and Georgetown for last 28 years with close ties, family relationships and business interests in Guyana.
He has 16 years in capital raising and asset management in London plus another 13 years in Fuel and Energy engineering field at the University of Leeds.
His financial experience spans hands-on research, development and trading experience of quantitative models applied to cash, bonds, equities and derivatives markets from high frequency and intraday to medium- and longer-term time scales.
He is currently Chief Investment Officer of FCA regulated wealth management office managing 700m USD of clients’ assets (foundations, charities, and trusts) along the model of the Norwegian Sovereign wealth fund and ESG principles which espouses investing for the long term in the global markets.
He started out his career at the University of Leeds where he was involved in teaching and research from 1997-2006 in the areas of fossil fuels and renewable energy, combustion, computational fluid dynamics and thermal engineering. He has published and presented works in international journals and conferences. He has a strong R&D background in conventional and renewable energy systems, CFD, biomass and biofuels, alternative energy systems and energy markets.
He was the warden of Charles Morris Hall of residence at the university of Leeds in charge of student pastoral care and was part of the University of Leeds best student experience and diversity committees.
He is an alumni of Queen’s College and St Rose’s High Schools in Georgetown, Guyana.
Ms. Grace Phillips
Award winning Guyanese Poet and Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, UK
Ms Grace Nichols
Grace Nichols is an award-winning Guyanese poet and an equally talented prose author. She was born in Georgetown in 1950 and grew up in a small country village on the coast.
She worked as a teacher, journalist, and a part of a Diploma in Communications at the University of Guyana and spent time in some of the most remote areas of Guyana. This was a period that influenced her writings; initiating a strong interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths, and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. She moved to UK in 1977.
Her first poetry collection, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, was first published in 1983. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and a subsequent film adaptation of the book was awarded a gold medal at the International Film and Television Festival of New York.
The book was also dramatised for radio by the BBC. Subsequent poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), and Sunris (1996). She also authors books for children, inspired predominantly by Guyanese folklore and Amerindian legends, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). Everybody Got A Gift (2005) includes new and selected poems, and her collection, Startling the Flying Fish (2006); contains poems which tell the story of the Caribbean.
Her latest books are Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010), The Insomnia Poems (2017), and Passport to Here and There (2020), which received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
In 2007, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Ms Nichols was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2021 for her body of work. She still currently lives in England (UK) with her partner; the poet John Agard.
His most recent research, titled Strategies to Improve the Survival Rate Beyond 5 Years for Small Businesses in Guyana, was published in 2020. The study analyzed the role of leadership, competitive advantage and business success, lack of finance, innovation, and the determinants of successful entrepreneurs in Guyana. Dr. Forde is committed to sharing his research on small and medium-sized business sustainability with educational institutions, the private sector, and government agencies in Guyana.
His professional career spans two decades in various capacities with AT&T, IBM, and Qwest in New York and Florida. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Forde was the founder of Four D’s International, a premier Guyanese entertainment complex in New York where thousands of Guyanese dined and danced in elegance for two decades.
He is a member of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce & Industry. He serves on the Entrepreneurship & Small Business Committee, where he will be working to enhance the services offered by the Private Sector to improve business competitiveness and sustainability by utilizing the findings from his recent research.
The United States House of Representatives presented a Proclamation to Dr. Forde for UGDGN Corp in 2019. He received the AT&T “Gold Club” and “Achiever’s Club awards. He is also an associate of the University of Guyana Foundation-USA.
Dr. Forde earned his Doctorate in Business Administration with a specialization in Energy Management from Walden University and a Master of Public Policy and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from American Public University.
Ms. Pauline Melville
Award Winning Guyanese Writer and internationally acclaimed winner of prizes for fiction
Ms Grace Nichols
Grace Nichols is an award-winning Guyanese poet and an equally talented prose author. She was born in Georgetown in 1950 and grew up in a small country village on the coast.
She worked as a teacher, journalist, and a part of a Diploma in Communications at the University of Guyana and spent time in some of the most remote areas of Guyana. This was a period that influenced her writings; initiating a strong interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths, and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. She moved to UK in 1977.
Her first poetry collection, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, was first published in 1983. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and a subsequent film adaptation of the book was awarded a gold medal at the International Film and Television Festival of New York.
The book was also dramatised for radio by the BBC. Subsequent poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), and Sunris (1996). She also authors books for children, inspired predominantly by Guyanese folklore and Amerindian legends, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). Everybody Got A Gift (2005) includes new and selected poems, and her collection, Startling the Flying Fish (2006); contains poems which tell the story of the Caribbean.
Her latest books are Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010), The Insomnia Poems (2017), and Passport to Here and There (2020), which received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
In 2007, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Ms Nichols was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2021 for her body of work. She still currently lives in England (UK) with her partner; the poet John Agard.
His most recent research, titled Strategies to Improve the Survival Rate Beyond 5 Years for Small Businesses in Guyana, was published in 2020. The study analyzed the role of leadership, competitive advantage and business success, lack of finance, innovation, and the determinants of successful entrepreneurs in Guyana. Dr. Forde is committed to sharing his research on small and medium-sized business sustainability with educational institutions, the private sector, and government agencies in Guyana.
His professional career spans two decades in various capacities with AT&T, IBM, and Qwest in New York and Florida. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Forde was the founder of Four D’s International, a premier Guyanese entertainment complex in New York where thousands of Guyanese dined and danced in elegance for two decades.
He is a member of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce & Industry. He serves on the Entrepreneurship & Small Business Committee, where he will be working to enhance the services offered by the Private Sector to improve business competitiveness and sustainability by utilizing the findings from his recent research.
The United States House of Representatives presented a Proclamation to Dr. Forde for UGDGN Corp in 2019. He received the AT&T “Gold Club” and “Achiever’s Club awards. He is also an associate of the University of Guyana Foundation-USA.
Dr. Forde earned his Doctorate in Business Administration with a specialization in Energy Management from Walden University and a Master of Public Policy and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from American Public University.