Supporting minoritised racial communities during the Covid-19 outbreak
Churchill Fellow Yvonne Field has launched a national petition which calls on the government to consider the challenges that are facing minoritised racial communities during the Covid-19 lockdown. Yvonne is the founder and managing director of Ubele, a social enterprise which is currently campaigning to ensure that the voices of minoritised racial communities are heard and their needs are met.
“We need to galvanise minoritised racial communities so that their voices and views can be heard and taken seriously. The work we have been doing over the past four weeks has been stretching, at times exhausting, but very necessary,” said Yvonne.
Statistics from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre suggest that minoritised racial communities in the UK are highly vulnerable to Covid-19. Of the 3,883 critical patients registered in the report, 33% were from minoritised racial communities. This is despite minoritised racial communities accounting for only 14% of the general population.
Yvonne’s social enterprise Ubele has also been conducting national research into the impact of Covid-19 on minoritised racial communities. This has highlighted that members of minoritised racial communities who are working on the frontline are not being included or considered in decisions being made by government and civil society leadership.
In response to this, on 1 April Ubele released a statement and launched a national petition which calls on the government to urgently conduct a full independent public investigation into why and how frontline staff from minoritised racial backgrounds are being disproportionately impacted by Covid-19.
Ubele are also hosting a series of weekly webinars where minoritised racial community groups and voluntary organisations can access information on funders that are offering emergency funding. Along with the webinars, Yvonne is also providing 1:1 support sessions for the webinars’ attendees to support individual funding applications.
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