Black Powerlist 2022 announced
Congratulations to all the incredible leaders on this year’s Black Power List!
England striker Marcus Rashford, Microsoft’s Jacky Wright, and I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel are among those who have topped this year’s Powerlist. The annual publication, first published in 2007, highlights prominent Black British individuals, in a bid to provide professional role models for young people of African and African Caribbean heritage.
Entrants are judged by their ‘ability to positively alter events and change lives as demonstrated over a reasonable period of time’, and awarded status based on positive influence in their immediate sphere and on its reach.
Rashford was selected as one of the most powerful advocates for the vulnerable and disadvantaged. “At the tender age of 23, Marcus Rashford is becoming the voice of a generation,” as the Powerlist puts it, having forced government change on issues including child poverty and hunger. As well as being awarded an MBE in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List, he also became the youngest person ever to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester.
Chief Digital officer and Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft, Jacky Wright has also made the list, recognised as a transformational global leader, innovative technologist, and passionate advocate for women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds. Meanwhile the 33-year-old actor and writer Michaela Coel, the creator of smash BBC hit, I May Destroy You, was also honoured. Loosely based on her own experience of sexual assault and racism, the series won BAFTAs galore, while its creator has been named one of Europe’s 30 Under 30 by Forbes and was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
Other winners include Anne Mensah, Vice-President Content UK, Netflix, who previously shaped the agenda for TV dramas on Sky and has been described by the Royal Television Society as ‘drama’s unique voice’. Spearheading Netflix’s £500,000 grant to help theatre practitioners unable to work, and ineligible for Government aid during the pandemic, she said "Creativity is all about collaboration, and we are deeply concerned by the challenges our friends in the theatre now face, especially in the regions, and the likely consequences for the diverse voices and stories at the heart of our culture."
Actor and ‘Get Out’ star Daniel Kaluuya is another who made the List, who this year became the first black British performer in Academy Awards history to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, as Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton in Judas And The Black Messiah. Other winners include Professor Kevin Fenton, Regional Director of Public Health, England, who as the Powelist puts it, “has been the main man” amid the public health response to London’s Covid-19 waves, “overseeing everything from the successful vaccine rollout to measures designed to mitigate spread in the city and protecting vulnerable communities”. Steven Bartlett, at 28 the youngest-ever Dragon on Dragon’s Den was also honoured. Co-founder and CEO of the social media marketing agency Social Chain, he had an estimated personal fortune of £68m, according to Forbes.
Others who made the list include Lord Woolley of Woodford, co-founder and director of Operation Black Vote, and the new Principal of Homerton College at the University of Cambridge – the first black man to hold such a post at Oxford or Cambridge. In 2019, he received a knighthood for his services to race equality. The Vice Chair of KPMG, Richard Iferenta, was also selected, as was lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie, a Partner at City firm Leigh Day – where she runs a department and a team of solicitors specialising in Windrush cases, immigration and infringements of civil liberties. In December 2020, her evidence to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee on the Windrush scandal resulted in the victims receiving compensation.
Although the Powerlist is primarily distributed to schools and universities, it has increasingly been requested by corporations, as a way of identifying black talent. This year’s judging panel included Linda Dobbs DBE, a former High Court Judge; Ijeoma Okoli, Executive Director, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co, Matthew Ryder QC, the former Deputy Mayor of London for Social Integration, Social Mobility and Community Engagement, and Dr Heather Melville OBE, CMMI Director, People Networks and Client PwC.