Page 108 - Powerlist 2019 - Digital Edition

COMMUNITY AWARD WINNER

Colleen Amos

Co-founder and CEO, The Amos Bursary

ome people are destined to sit on the throne,
others like to be the power behind it. The
Swinner of this year’s Powerlist Community
Award is just such a person.
Over the past nine years, Colleen Amos, CEO of
the Amos Bursary, has built one of Britain’s most
respected community charities from nothing.
While it would be unfair to the volunteers
whose dedication has also contributed so much
to the success of the charity, to say that Colleen
has done it single-handedly, the fact is that the
Amos Bursary would not exist if it were not for her
sacrifice and hard work.
Anyone who has met one of the young men
associated with the Amos Bursary will immediately
understand why it is renowned as one of the best-
run, most professional charities in the African and
African Caribbean community.
It was set up by Colleen and her sister Baroness
Amos, in memory of their late parents. The
Bursary challenges, inspires and develops talented
British students of African and African Caribbean
heritage, ‘who have excelled at school and
have not allowed their environments, personal
circumstances, or the pressures of living in London,
to cloud their vision or to hamper their dreams’.
Essentially the boys – the charity works only
with boys because research has shown that even
with very good grades, black boys face extreme
difficulty getting into top universities and do
not have the same career opportunities that are
available to other students – are put through a
comprehensive four-year mentoring scheme.
The aim being to turn them into smart, articulate
graduates who understand opportunities when
they see them and are skilled enough to take
advantage of them too. “I did it because I believed in the bursary. I
While Baroness Amos uses her very considerable decided that I wanted to turn it into something,”
influence to open doors for the charity which has she says.
led to funding and myriad other opportunities for She’s certainly delivered on that. When it first
the boys, Colleen’s role has been to run the charity started the Bursary catered to just seven boys,
day to day, which she has done selflessly, making now they have 100 on the core Amos Bursary
some enormous personal sacrifices along the way. programme and another on the associate
For the first three years of the Bursary’s programme.
existence, Colleen combined running the It grows every year, but as it scales up, so does
charity with her day job as a marketing and its level of professionalism and that is largely down
communications professional (Colleen has more to the resilience of its single full-time member of
than 30 years’ experience in senior positions in staff -Colleen.
private and public sector organisations). Then she In recognition for her work at the Bursary
decided that the Bursary needed her full-time if it and in schools and colleges, Colleen has been
was to not simply survive, but prosper, so the day the recipient of three national awards by the
job had to go, along with a more than Association of Business Psychologists. Now she
decent salary. has another one.

104 Powerlist 2019