Founder/CEO
Ben is founder of Power The Fight, a new charity which launched in January 2019 to train and empower communities to end youth violence.
One of The Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 London’s most influential people for 2018, Ben is an experienced trainer and facilitator with more than 19 years spent working with high risk young people in the field of gangs and serious youth violence.
Ben began his career developing programmes in some of the most challenging estates in London (Brixton, Clapham and Lewisham). In 2003 he became a learning mentor at a primary school in the borough of Lewisham, South East London before joining the Lewisham Youth Offending Service, where he worked in a number of roles, including leading the early intervention team.
While at Lewisham, Ben developed several successful programmes including the ground-breaking knife crime prevention programme Double Edge for offenders of knife crime, which was featured in the ‘Gang and Group Offenders – A Practitioner’s Handbook of Ideas & Interventions’ published by the London Criminal Justice Board.
In 2010 Ben developed the gangs and serious youth violence strategy for Camden Council and then went on to work for the mental health charity MAC-UK leading their mini mac project.
Ben was Chair of the Greenwich Independent Advisory Group until 2016. Between 2016 -2020, Ben was lead pastor at Emmanuel New Cross in South East London. He currently sits on the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s Violence Reduction Unit reference group and on the cross-party Youth Violence Commission.
His first book, the No1 Bestseller, ‘We Need To Talk About Race – Understanding the Black Experience in White Majority Churches‘ was released in July 2019 through SPCK Publishing.