The African Diaspora Community are capable of providing every solution we require from inside

COVID-19 Advice Protocols for the British African Diaspora marathon Live cast

At 7pm on Thursday 16th of April we broadcast a live cast of expertise that went across personal finance, parenting advice, mental health coping mechanisms, educational resources, spirituality, community organisations and media ownership. The panels were filled with extremely experienced personnel who conveyed their intellectual capital to a live audience over five and a half hours.

The expertise featured on the ADPAC live cast are a tiny microcosm of expertise from the UK and due to running over time, we lost six contributors who were equally as qualified. The point is that we as the British African diaspora have every single expertise with our community to deliver culturally competent solutions tailored to our needs and this is the case across the globe with the entire diaspora.

There is no community on earth with better informed expertise, the difference between our experiences is that they have systems in place for cohesive community organisation that far outweigh our organisational structures, in a nutshell we are out organised and we are beyond the point of having the luxury to call on the masses.

This approach is Face Book vs. Linked In and Linked In is where we need to be creating the call for those from the diaspora who are working at every level of operations and management within highly successful multi million pound corporations and creating systems within them that earn the corporation a hundred times more than the system designer.

#ADPAC COVID-19 Advice Protocols for British African Diaspora YouTube live cast

It's time to apply our own oxygen mask first because if we can't breathe we are no good to ourselves. We must harness our expertise around vehicles that can provide mass solutions and will serve as essential services to the African Diaspora global community or we are wasting our time as corporate brothers and sisters who are espousing the virtues of the global economy.

In listening to Ambassador Arikana Chihombori-Quao, who was on a live cast with Deantaa Amoateng MBE (which is also a recommended watch), she said we work in silos and think as individuals within our own individual struggles instead of thinking like Africans who are part of a 1.5 billion global population and herein lies the problem.

No ethnicity on the planet is represented as a colour in the context of national conversations and this is something we have to face that we are responsible for. The diaspora are separated from our continent by a psychological mind set installed by external communities. The deep rooted neurosis we suffer that enables other ethnicities to define us is the root cause for our low social standing and responsible for us being at the bottom of every measurable metric.

We are all guilty of this non serving mind state to some degree and it has adverse affects on some area of our lives as a by-product. The good news is there is no end of help out there to alter the course of our thinking to serve our socio economic aspirations and the Live cast was a small demonstration of the cross cutting themes articulated by the various panels that went across personal finances, parenting, mental health, educational resources, spirituality and media.

Dean Okai Snr Paul McKenzie and Robert Robinson in the importance of media ownership section of COVID-19 Advice Protocols for the African Diaspora

The one thing all of those areas has in common is us and the cross cutting themes are pertinent because we in the diaspora are a clear representation that what we are doing to isolate ourselves within other ethnicities social structures and economies isn't serving us. We are perfectly well serving them and it is a one sided relationship of give from us and take from them.

This time calls for a mind shift away from just climbing the corporate ladders outside of the African Diaspora business place to look inward and identify what opportunities there may be to employ our expertise to corporate vehicles within our own communities that require boards to be competitive against other ethnicities corporations.

If you can't envisage the concept of a European business owner organising their event booking with Jus-Tickets then you should question why you as a business owner are organising your event booking with EventBrite. Respect is commanded by reciprocity and that is demonstrated by you building your vehicle first and then doing business on equal footing with other vehicle owners. If you were sitting in your broken down car, nobody would volunteer to start pushing it but if you were pushing your car others would join you without asking.

The power of self determination lies in you pushing your own broken down car, which will attract those of a similar ilk to join you in moving your vehicle towards your intended destination. This is no different from your business, your community organisation or your own personal house hold. Those of a similar ilk aren't talking anymore but joining eachother at an exponential rate and working towards self determination by recommending eachother and patronising each other's business services.

By Dean Okai Snr