Black History Month launches across Greater Manchester
The Caribbean and African Health Network has launched a month of celebrations.
Last updated 1st Oct 2020
Black History Month has launched across Greater Manchester with a theme of celebration for the contributions made by the Black community in our society.
The month kicked off with an event hosted by the Caribbean and African Health Network (CAHN) for the second year in a row. It's usuaully a celebration held at Manchester Cathedral although this year's was hosted online, due to the ongoing COVID19 restrictions.
CAHN is a non-profit organisation which was founded in 2017 with the purpose of empowering, enabling and equipping faith and community organisations with the infrastructure to deliver and shape health and wellbeing services.
The group works collaboratively with commissioners, statutory organisations and voluntary sector organisations with a particular emphasis on sustaining health and wellbeing provision within the Caribbean and African community.
Chair of the board, Faye Bruce, gave the opening words to mark the beginning of the month and outlined what this year is all about: "The contribution of people from the Caribbean and African diaspora is one to celebrate - it's rich, colourful and diverse.
"We have a heterogeneous mix of people in Greater Manchester from cross 52 African countries and at least 28 island nations in the Caribbean.
"The theme for this year is - learning from the past, navigating the present and transforming the future. It focuses on the importance of how much we learn from history and we're transforming the ways that we collectively all come together to build a better future.
"We're living in the light of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the horrific killing of George Floyd, and the disproportionate impact of COVID19 on the Black community."
The Dean of Manchester, Rogers Govender, is a Patron of CAHN and spoke of his ambition to continue fighting for change: "We still have an enormous mountain to climb when dealing with racism and discrimination.
"We have so much work to do. I am very pleased that in our City of Manchester, a lot of hard work is going on to address racism but we cannot ever sit back and say 'it's going to be alright''.
"We have to actively work for equality, for inclusion, for diversity and for an end to racism in our city region."
Throughout the month we'll be shining a light on the contributions of the Black community, as well as highlighting the work of allies to bring about change.