Many years ago, I came to Manchester to visit a friend at the Global Development Institute. My train stopped at Victoria Station, and I remember thinking about the mix of history and contemporary architecture. I couldn’t stop gazing at the redness and earthiness of the buildings. The city felt like a palimpsest, with history and modernity layered over one another. We took a long walk down Oxford Road that day.

Fast forward to 2024, when I started my MBA at Alliance Manchester Business School, and it felt like a full-circle moment. Oxford Road will always be etched in my memory. It leads to the library, the museum, and Mr Egg Taiwanese restaurant, one of my favourite lunch spots. When days were tough, I would walk down that road to remind myself why this journey into Manchester mattered. The street is always buzzing: students rushing off the 142 bus so they don’t miss class, cyclists navigating busy pavements, and people discovering the city. Whatever our individual ambitions, Manchester holds us all. In its own way, it makes room for everyone.

My work has taken me across all ten boroughs of Greater Manchester, supporting Black and Racially Minoritised-led organisations to secure funding and build their footing. Travelling from borough to borough has shown me the distinct character of each community, and how much quiet, often unfunded work goes into holding them together.

When I reflect on this year’s theme, honouring our communities, I think of people like Professor Erinma Bell, who grew up in Moss Side and, after witnessing a friend being shot, built CARISMA to give young people an alternative to gun and gang violence. Her statue now stands in Manchester Town Hall, cast from melted-down guns, and is the first statue of a woman there in 150 years. Some of the freedoms and spaces we benefit from in this city today exist because people like her refused to accept things as they were.

Honour is knowing whose shoulders you stand on and living that legacy in the present. It means recognising people’s dignity and credibility, rather than reducing them to narratives about udermining the welfare and immigration systems. It means not using someone’s lived experience as a talking point for political or personal gain. It means allowing people to move, to live freely, and simply to be.

It can be uncomfortable. It asks us to sit with what we do not fully understand, to share power rather than hold it, and to listen in ways that lead to real change rather than tick-box exercises in diversity and equity. At its simplest, honouring is kindness. It is being your brother’s keeper. It is looking out for one another. It is letting people be.

Beyond Black History Month, I continue to look for ways to honour and nurture communities, to show up for them, and to spread as much love as I can. Oxford Road might be where it started, but the lessons reach far beyond Manchester, and I carry them wherever I go.

Remember, love is a verb.

Joshua Osemudiabhen Okoduwa
Founder of Restructure Africa Foundation, Trustee at the Beatrice Gilmore Charitable Trust, and Chapter Lead of the Black Young Professionals Network Manchester

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