The arrival of our first guest speaker in 2025, Naomi Alexander Naidoo, could not have been timelier. Global news that morning was all about Mark Zuckerberg ending the use of independent fact checkers on the tech giant Meta and Naomi’s work is in a field which attempts to hold Big Tech companies to account. Luminate (the organisation Naomi works for) has a mission to ensure everyone – especially those who are underrepresented – has the information, rights, and power to influence the decisions that affect their lives. Their aim is to stop the ability of people being able to use information as a weapon.
Naomi spoke about her own path through life which led to a social impact career. This included the thrill of moving to a big city, the different style of education she encountered in the Netherlands, her experiences of working for various international charities and her current role as a partnership lead. Naomi specialises in building networks, communities, and communication strategies for social and environmental justice issues.
Naomi encouraged our young people to think about what style of learning they would like to encounter beyond our walls, to think about the jobs that may not even exist yet, to investigate fields and the roles that exist within them that they may never have even heard of. One of the important messages that she left our students with was to think about their own personal attributes. Who would have thought that Naomi’s love of parties, getting friends together, organising social activities and events for her friends would be exactly the skills she needed in her career. She brings together, finds spaces for them to speak, collaborates, initiates and activates campaigns that are aimed at social equality and justice.
Some of our own students were commendable in their insightful questioning of the difficulty in finding a balance between freedom of speech vs hateful content.
