At first glance, women’s football and the creative industries might seem worlds apart. But look closer, and the challenges facing young people trying to enter these fields are strikingly similar: limited access, narrow networks, and a lack of visible role models.

In this episode, Rachel Yankey, founder of the Rachel Yankey Foundation and former England footballer, joins Creative Mentor Network’s Operations Director, Luca Hussain, and Grayling Senior Counsel, Tanya Joseph, for a candid conversation about social mobility – how opportunity is created – and why it’s so often out of reach.

They discuss everything from early experiences and confidence-building to class, culture, and the power of representation.

You can listen to the full episode below, followed by the complete transcript. To listen to previous episodes, head to our podcast page.

Transcript

00:00:09 Tanya Joseph

Hello and welcome to the Grayling Media podcast. I’m Tanya Joseph. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by two exceptionally talented and inspiring women who are helping to break down barriers for young people.

Rachel Yankee is a former England international and England star who launched The Rachel Yankee Foundation improve access for young girls in football.

With the creation of community hubs, the foundation sets out to foster confidence, resilience and a lifelong love of sport amongst young girls from all backgrounds, giving them the tools they need to thrive on and off the pitch.

And Luca Hussain is head of programming and Impact at Creative Mentor Network, a social mobility charity working to support class diversity in the creative industries by connecting talented young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with industry mentors.

Luca uses creativity as a powerful means to empower young people from drama workshops that build confidence to mentoring programmes that help young women break into competitive industries. She’s helping to dismantle the barriers that hold the power talent back. Welcome Rachel and Luca, thank you so much for joining the pod. It’s really great to have you here today.

You’re both working really hard to break down barriers for young people and to create more opportunities across sport and the creative industries.

Can you tell me why it’s so important for you both? Maybe Luca, you could start.

00:01:34 Luca Hussain

Yeah, of course. The reason it’s so important for me, I’ve always been very values lead in what I want to do for my career. That was really instilled in me from a young age. I grew up in Bradford with a single mum. My mum was a teacher and I grew up really seeing her work really hard to help people. I always knew I wanted to do something that was for social good. We live in quite an unfair system and it’s really important for us all to do what we can to try and make that a little bit fairer. And I’m really passionate, particularly about helping young people at that really early age, find that confidence, figure out what it is that they love. Figure out how they want to kind of live their lives and what they want to do with their lives. And I’m really passionate about making sure that that talent goes recognised. That young people are given opportunities, no matter their class background and given everything that they need to be able to really thrive. I’m really happy to be doing that at Creative Mentor Network.

00:02:38 Tanya Joseph

Thanks. Rachel?

00:02:38 Rachel Yankey

I echo everything you said, fantastic. From a young age, I suppose through playing football and joining Arsenal at the age of 16, I understood the responsibility you have and when you’re, I suppose, given the opportunity, you know, to shine and to be able to be you and be free, that’s powerful.

Nowadays, it’s more difficult for young girls especially, and that of young people, but young girls, especially in the world of sport and football, to be seen and to be heard and to be given that opportunity, and to understand that football and sport is such a powerful tool to actually doing so much more than just what we do on the pitch. That was one small part of what’s made me, but actually I look at being able to look back at all the fantastic opportunities and things that I’ve done, they’ve all came through because of football.

It’s taught me how to speak to people, have confidence and be able to coach children or speak in assembly and stuff like that, things that you wouldn’t necessarily feel that you were able to do, but, you push those boundaries that we put on ourselves. Actually football gave me the belief that I could do anything.

If it can do that for me, it could do that for loads of other young girls and there’s still equalities out there. We need to make sure that young girls have the, you know, the power. We empower them to actually believe, whether they go on to be footballers is quite irrelevant to be honest.

00:05:05 Tanya Joseph

That’s what we’ve been doing when we’re training football and sporting journalists and it’s extraordinary catalysts for young people, but particularly for girls, we know that if they are involved in physical activity, if they, if they start doing it, especially if they start doing earlier, they’re more likely to be more confident, more likely to do well at school, more likely to to be able to to work in a team, to make friends. All of those things. But so often they’re not. They’re not being encouraged to do that. Barriers are put in their way.

That’s something I’d really like us to explore as we have this conversation.

I’m much older than you guys and when I was growing up there were very few people that looked like me either in sport or in the creative industries. I really, really, really wanted to, to be a journalist. When I was younger. But I looked at the people that were writing in newspapers and were on the telly. There was literally no one that looked like me.

When Trevor McDonald came on TV, we were super excited because there was a black person, right?

When you were younger, who did you look up to and what were the role models that worked for you?

00:05:49 Rachel Yankey

My biggest role model was Ian Wright, obviously an Arsenal fan and I didn’t see any other females playing football, so for me definitely when I was younger, if you’d ask me who plays football, I would have said exactly what I was being told and being shown, because although I loved it and I really enjoyed playing football, I would have told you that men play football and boys football and I would have said all those things, which disappoints me, but I suppose you get into that system and you’re institutionalised in thinking that same way. Although I knew that I was really good at it and I really enjoyed it. I found Ian Wright so relatable and loads of other kids in in my school were the same. When you were playing in that cage it was like you were free. And when he was playing at the highest level and smiling, he was dancing around. It’s just the same as what we were doing. But in the school playground.

When you know you miss or someone doesn’t pass to you, that frustration that comes out of you could feel how his emotions and that’s exactly the same as our emotions. And it was like he was just mirroring what we were doing and that was why for me, he was the most relatable.

I would run around the playground pretending to be Ian Wright, trying to do his dances. Another thing if football, we look at different players, but it’s mainly the strikers that you look at and that’s why it’s so important that you have visible role models that people can relate to.

00:07:40 Tanya Joseph

And he’s been a massive champion of the women’s game. I mean, his commentary over the last tournament, it’s been extraordinary. Yeah, he’s been passionate from the get go. He’s really been there supporting.

00:07:56 Rachel Yankey

It just feels real.

00:08:00 Tanya Joseph

And what about you, Luca?

00:08:02 Luca Hussain

Touching on what you said, Rachel, about relatability, often when you’re young, you look to the people around you and who you grow up around. I mentioned earlier that my mum was a teacher and she was definitely a role model for me. As a single mum, working super hard, doing her job. She really, really cared, really being a great role model for me and my sister. I actually went on to study English at University and everyone thought I was going to be a teacher just like my mum. And I was like, it’s not for me. I saw how hard she worked. I thought, I don’t think I could do that. But what was interesting for me is I never really knew what I wanted to do growing up. I was not one of those people that like had a dream from being really young. I had the classics of wanting to be a singer or I wanted to be a vet at one point, or an ambulance driver. But I never had that passion from a really early age and that’s what my heart set on and that’s what I really want to do.

It can be difficult if you’re not looking towards a traditional professional, you don’t take a traditional room in to have that person to be able to really admire and something we talk a lot about at Creative Mentor Network is you can’t be what you can’t see. It really speaks to the fact that if you grow up in a small town or you’re from a lower socio-economic background, or you’re a person of colour and you don’t necessarily see a wide variety of jobs and professions that that interest you growing up, or you’re really interested in a creative career and your parents don’t do that or they don’t know anyone that does that. You’re not going to think that’s for you. And that’s why it’s so important for young people to be able to see people that look like them. Sound like them. Come from similar backgrounds to them. I probably did lack that a little bit growing up but. But having my mum as a teacher was someone that I really, definitely looked up to. And she’s probably influenced me massively to where I am now today.

00:09:55 Tanya Joseph

Shout out to all the mums.

Rachel, what are your ambitions and dreams for your foundation? And what would you most like to see change for young girls who want to be a footballer?

00:10:09 Rachel Yankey

I suppose the ambition and dreams is setting it up is just to bring fairness. Create an environment where actually girls can feel that they’re believed in, that they’re empowered to actually be something, that there’s an opportunity they can create. What you’ve said, networks, if you don’t know that you can do that as a job. Maybe you see somebody else doing it and you then get belief of it or you discover something and what we’ve tried to create is local hubs, bringing girls from the community of different backgrounds all together, and actually just getting them, yes, using football, but getting them to talk, getting them to mix with each other, and then obviously once we get bigger, the ambition is to bring other networks in and allow these girls to have opportunities. Your passion might be football, but you might not necessarily want to become a footballer, and that’s OK. Usually when people talk about football. They just talk about the footballer, but there’s so many other jobs that you can you can be within the game of football, within that industry. The girl that really likes English, might become a journalist. But they might become a sports journalist, and that might be your path.

With the networks that obviously we have, can we help that girl and empower her  to believe that opportunity is not just for people you see on TV? Everybody starts somewhere, and maybe that’s their starting point. So yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do.

00:12:06 Tanya Joseph

Networks is a really important element of that, because again, I’m going to talk about my own personal experience, but when I was younger, my parents were really supportive and really encouraging, but they didn’t know anyone who worked in the in the industry. With the best will in world, they couldn’t help me. My teachers couldn’t really help me again, really supportive teachers. But how do you unlock that, how do you help people? Not to get me a job. I didn’t want someone to just give me a job because I asked them for it. I wanted to talk to someone to say, well, what does it really mean? In your foundation, right, you’re helping to give people the opportunity to talk to people, and the work that you’re doing, Luca, to encourage creative organisations to have conversations with young people, to tell them what it’s what’s it really like working in this industry? What do you really need? And to encourage them to build their networks, to build people who can be their allies, their champions, their support network, so they can get a step, they can get a foot in the door.

I need to ask you, Rachel, about the football this summer and how it must have felt to see England lift that trophy again, I mean I shed a tear. It was emotional.

It must have been really powerful and inspiring, not just to you, but to the young women that you work with.

00:13:30 Rachel Yankey

100% and we did a little video. We sent a little video out because some of the girls were just they are inspired. They are role models and it’s fantastic to see.

When I was growing up, I couldn’t name a female footballer, I didn’t know any. And then when you did start to know some, the visibility wasn’t there and you couldn’t have conversations with other people because I might have known them. But they didn’t know them. But now people can actually, walk down the street, they can talk about Joe Kelly or whoever you know, Leah Williamson and people know who they’re talking about and they can have those conversations. It was fantastic to see that from our players. But equally, as a former player, it’s one thing in 2022 to win a home Euros to then go and do it again, back-to-back Euro champions. That is incredibly difficult and also the pressure that was on the team because they were the reigning champions, there’s a target on their back. They didn’t play particularly well, which adds to it. It definitely makes it easier when you’re speaking to this. Not everything is rosy. Not everything happens in the perfect way.

But if you stay together as a team, and if you have grit and determination, and you stick to your plan, and you understand everybody’s job, you can reach that success that that they reached. There was just so many little different bits that you just feel proud of that. They were able to win that trophy in in the manner that they won, sometimes you don’t play your best game, but you work hard, you stick together and you get the result and resilience, it was really, really important.

00:15:27 Tanya Joseph

That was one of the things that comes through. It’s like, yeah, there were a few hairy moments in that tournament, but they, you know what, there was a lot of determination, and not just from the players, but from the whole team that you know the people off the field as well. Yeah. And again really important lesson for young people.

Luca, what do you think are the main challenges facing young people in the creative industries and what would you say is the number one barrier you would overcome in the years ahead?

00:16:01 Luca Hussain

A lot of the stuff you were touching on earlier actually, Tanya, what we see for young people is it starts really early. Education is a real talking point for us, in the sense that we’ve seen over the last decade or so, the arts and arts subjects have massively been deprioritised in the curriculum and so young people are not getting the chance to have that drama lesson or that music lesson or that art lesson that helps them, as you were talking about earlier, it will not just develop a love for creative subjects, but also learn about themselves. Learn how to express themselves, speaking and listening skills, teamwork, creativity. All those really important lessons that you learn through creative subjects that help with your own personal and educational development.

We’re seeing less and less young people are being entered for arts GCSE’s. I read a stat the other day that there was zero young people entered for dance GCSE last year, which is such a for kids to not have that opportunity. They’re leaving school, maybe feeling like that’s a bit of a less legitimate thing for them to then pursue. You’re not going to want to pursue a career in television if you didn’t get to have that drama lesson at school.

As well as that lack of prioritisation of arts, the careers education is a massive piece, so lots of schools are struggling for funding, they’re struggling to offer really useful, helpful career advice for young people and especially when it comes to creative ways. There are so many jobs in the creative industries like you were touching on before. The less obvious roles, the behind the scenes roles there. If teachers themselves don’t know about them, how are they meant to teach young people about those roles that exist and show them “you’re quite interested in this subject” and “you’ve got these skills. Have you thought about, say, a career in a creative direction or marketing or something that’s a little bit less traditional?” So young people are not getting that chance to figure out what kind of creative career they might want to pursue. I also saw, sadly, the other day about how less than 1/3 of young people are now doing work experience at school, not getting that chance to try out those careers. Figure out what it is that they like and what you touched on earlier, Tanya, when I was a kid, someone who literally just lived down our street was a graphic designer and my mum was like, “let’s go and ask him if you can go in and do kind of a week’s work experience going to his office, seeing what it’s like”. And that was such a formative experience for me to be like, ohh, he’s got a really cool job and he earns enough money and he goes to this office in Leeds every week. I got to see that a creative career was like a legitimate thing. If your parents don’t know someone who does a creative job and can’t pull those strings for you, then you’re not going to leave school having been exposed to that creative career either.

After education, when it comes to the creative industries themselves and those barriers to entry, we’re seeing lots of things around unpaid internships. They’re still technically illegal, but they still happen a lot. Young people being asked to work for free. It might be cloaked as work experience or shadowing, but they are actually going in and doing a bit of work.

If you need to earn money, pay your rent, put food on the table, contribute maybe to your family, you’re not going to be able to have the opportunity to work for free. You’re going to need something that actually pays you really well, so that cuts out a whole lot of young people who just can’t afford to be able to work for free. The networks again, is something that we have spoken about a lot in the creative industries. A recent stat, 70% of creative industry roles are still being hired and advertised in non-traditional ways. A fancy way of saying conversations down the pub or nepotism. Does someone know someone and can offer them that job in a way that’s a little bit more underhand. I don’t always think that’s a bad thing, knowing the right person for the job and feeling like you might be able to offer someone a role because you have a lot of trust and faith in their ability is a credible thing. What the barrier too for young people is if you don’t have that network, if you didn’t grow up and leave school with the network of people that work in creative industries, you’re just shut out of loads of jobs and it’s about getting that foot in the door. Like you said, Tanya. That’s why it’s so important that companies are really aware of these barriers and are doing what they can to kind of dismantle them so that they are reaching young people from different backgrounds, changing the makeup of the industries and starting to bring a bit more diversity into the creative industries.

00:20:41 Tanya Joseph

And as employers, it’s really important that we recognise that and often we need someone. We need someone as soon as possible. Who do we know? And again, sometimes that is the right response because there’s real pressure and there are people in the team that are overworked or whatever. But we also have a responsibility to make sure that the people we know are broader than the people we happen to be related to, right? It’s one of the things that we work really hard at Grayling, a little plug for us here, is that we do make sure that we are extending our networks all the time, making sure that we’re not always going to the same group of people that everyone else is, frankly.

There is talent everywhere and we need to make sure that we are reaching into, we’re going everywhere to find that talent and making sure that those talented people particularly and people know that we exist. That’s a responsibility that that as all employers really need to have.

00:21:34 Luca Hussain

Absolutely. And as you say it, it doesn’t have to be a massive change from the top. It can be those small steps where you take part in a programme like ours with Creative Mentor Network, you meet  11 new young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, see their talent and maybe one of them gets recommended for an opportunity or one of them meets another Grayling member and then their name is in their mind when something comes up.

It’s about, step by step, just broadening those networks and yeah, we’ve worked with almost 2000 young people now and we have such a an amazing network of young people to tap into. We know how talented they are. Every business that ends up working with those, knows how talented those young people are. It’s about creating those networks and those spaces and facilitating those conversations and those connections so that when an opportunity comes up, then you can call and ask can I get some of their young people involved.

And because your boys network exists, we need to create a new version of that and I’m constantly trying.to ask who do I know who’s going to be great for that role? And look, I’m subverting the system and the system isn’t fair. But how can we just make it work for us?

00:22:41 Tanya Joseph

Absolutely, Rachel, from your perspective, working with young people in sport, what do you think of the barriers or the deterrence that might signal to them that a career in football isn’t obvious to them and or open to them.

00:22:57 Rachel Yankey

Sometimes the barriers probably start at home with knowledge from parents or older siblings, especially for female football of what you can or can’t do, or what you should be doing as a female. With the foundation, you know our aim is not only to give. Girls are safe space to play, but it’s also we have a knowledge that we have to get the parents in with us into the community, feel and understand what we’re doing. But also I suppose, in a way educate them that it’s OK for girls to pursue sport but also it’s a real benefit.

Actually, those life skills, being able to then get a better job because you’re more confident and you understand how to work in a team. Making sure that the parents see them coming to one day a week or two day a week training session is a real benefit for their lives.

For us it’s just about loads of opportunities giving people exposure to something that they haven’t necessarily got.

00:24:20 Tanya Joseph

And Lucas’s organisation is all about getting people from lower socio economic groups into creative industries. But football has traditionally been quite good at that. If you look, the players, in particular on the field, tend to be skew from lower socioeconomic groups. Do you think they’re lessons that the creative industries can learn about how you attract and create roots for young people to join, how you’ve done it in in football. What could we learn?

00:24:59 Rachel Yankey

To be honest, this is where you have to split football in everything. What you’re saying is absolutely true, but in men’s football. In women’s football, it’s not. There’s probably many, many reasons for that. Women’s football, at a point, needed to take a different direction to make sure that that females have the opportunity to play and be recognised and actually going to join the men’s football and the women’s football together in terms training, the grounds and facilities, so that the budgets could be kept lower if you’re using the men’s training ground. If you’re getting something I don’t know. Gift in kind or whatever, but then those training grounds the men’s training grounds, especially the higher the level of male football teams are in the middle of nowhere because they don’t want people watching their training sessions and they don’t want people coming to see them.

Those training sessions you need support, you need parental support, you need a car to get there. You need everything. So it does marginalise people. Then the talent spotting is not necessary. And that’s one of the big reasons with the foundation why we’re looking at inner city goals in London. There’s a lack of actual opportunity and you see it at the highest level of the WSL, but the highest level of England football playing for our country that actually there’s a really small minority that actually come from London, which baffles me. When I grew up playing, there was more London-based players in the England team. There was more diversity.

But again I it goes back to women’s football to then up its visibility how it paid for you. There are many reasons that I probably don’t know the answer to, but to put women’s football on a stage where you’ve now got it as WSL, fully professional, they had to choose a route and at that moment they weren’t looking at what could be missed and where it could really hurt. What’s been left behind is people from lower incomes. There’s been a real class division and that’s something that now people recognise and are trying to mend and trying to address, making football, especially at the elite level, a lot closer to the inner cities.

Enabling people to get their people of all different colours, backgrounds and cultures, but then also it’s a huge job because as much as you’re doing it on the playing side, you have to then do it on the management side, the coaching. I remember when I first went to play I was what, 16-17 going into my first England camp. The manager talking about dishes and waves and formations, and I was thinking I wasn’t taught that way. I grew up playing football with the kids in on my road, at the local park, and we just played and it was sink or swim, you just survived.

To go in there and someone teaching you and talking all this jargon that I had no clue what they were going on about. It was about me. I could survive because I was used to that. Finding a different way of managing it. But young kids now, they need to understand that terminology. They need to be in a safe space where they can hear those words, they can ask questions in a safe manner rather than being on a trial and being under pressure and not knowing what to do. And then that be your one and only chance. Now we have a job to do. Yes, with the players, but also with the coaches that we’re bringing in through these coaches. Do they look like me, that do I feel comfortable or do they speak like me? I played in early years of Arsenal where I probably was the only person that that looked like me, but everybody we went to the same type of schools. We talked the same. I didn’t actually feel out of place, although people didn’t necessarily look like me. But now if coaches are not like that, if management still has an issue.

00:29:50 Tanya Joseph

Yeah, the feeling like you doesn’t need necessarily mean looking like you. It means understanding the experiences that you will have coming from the same neighbourhoods, understanding what those neighbourhoods are like and if everyone went to a private school with lovely facilities. Yeah, again, really good players. But their experience is really different and won’t necessarily understand what it’s like for kids who are playing in those literally, the cages, that you see across London, which is a very, very different experience.

I suppose it’s quite similar in the creative industries?

00:30:26 Luca Hussain

Yeah, lots. As you were speaking, I was just thinking, there’s so many interesting overlaps. Something we talk about a lot and in the creative industries is this idea of what cultural capital you’ve got. It links so much to class in terms of what your references are like, what you watch, what your family are into, how you talk, what your acting is like – and things like jargon, acronyms, stuff like that. We talk a lot about young people just needing that experience to be able to have gone into a creative office. So they know what does DOP mean? Oh, do people wear trainers here? Do I have to dress smart? Really, an important part of the responsibility lies with the creative industries, it has to be able to try and change it. As you were saying, not just the people entering but the people in management, the people making those decisions. What approach are you taking to the cultural makeup of your workforce. We talk about culture fit versus culture add. A lot of the time when people hire someone, they might ask are they a good culture fit? And this has become such an insidious biassed term that that literally means would they have done the same things at the weekend to the people on our team today? One that comes up all the time in our training is were they at Glastonbury, do they have a Soho House membership?

00:31:36 Tanya Joseph

Drives me crazy.

00:31:51 Luca Hussain

Yeah! Do they wear the same clothes? Do they sound the same? And actually what you just end up with is a totally homogeneous workforce where everyone looks and sounds the same and you’re not having any diversity in your team, which actually has a really knock on effect on the work you produce. Are you having diversity of thought where people are bringing different cultural experiences and conversations. We really try and encourage companies to think in a more culture add approach. What are they bringing that’s actually different to our team? Do they come from a different background? Do they grow up in a different country and are they from a different class background and making sure that you are not just replicating the same person again and again in your team. That idea of cultural capital, when people clock on to it, really awakens them. For cultural exchange too, because the idea of there being one culture that’s desired and others that aren’t is also really biassed in itself.

We have young kids that might grow up and speak five different languages at home, but it’s not the languages that are desired as being culturally interesting in certain spaces. Or they might play an instrument that’s from their culture in Pakistan. But that’s not a cool thing in a certain culture. Just having that cultural exchange and making sure that we’re always bringing in different types of people so that everyone doesn’t look and sound the same.

00:33:20 Tanya Joseph

Yeah, I do a lot of work with cultural organisations and one of the things that drives me is to encourage more young people from whatever background, to give it a go. Very often, and I’m really lucky because my parents absolutely understood cultural capital and encouraged us, took us to museums and concerts and galleries.

Western culture and global South culture, but I often feel that young people think that’s not for me, so I’m not even going to give it go because people like me don’t go there. Getting them to understand that actually someone like me goes there. Some of it is great. And some of it’s not great, but you should give it a try.

00:33:44 Luca Hussain

Yeah.

00:34:01 Tanya Joseph

That’s a whole other podcast. We have another day.

00:34:06 Tanya Joseph

It would be really good to tell me a bit about your hopes for the future and for the next generation, Rachel.

00:34:14 Rachel Yankey

In terms of women’s football, it’s in a fantastic place and we just need to keep building on the top. Obviously, winning brings people along on the journey, but make sure that we don’t forget the bottom and the grassroots side of it and they just keep building that up so that we can have a more successful equal game that that understands the benefits to young girls rather than just do we want to produce the next footballer and  make money that way.

00:34:56 Tanya Joseph

It does mean that the FA Sport England, all those other organisations really need to think about how they leverage the win because winning isn’t enough, right? When kids, when the young girls turn up to the park, to the club, there needs to be an environment that’s welcoming, that gets what they want, is not expecting them to train from the get go five nights a week or whatever it is. That it has an offer which is suitable for them, and that that means that people really need to work hard and think hard.

00:35:15 Rachel Yankey

Yeah.100%.

Women’s football needs to be looked at differently to men’s football, but equally grassroots football needs to be looked at differently to the elite side. Grassroots football should always be about having fun. Participation and creating definitely something like what we did with the foundation and Grayling has been brilliant helping us launch the foundation and bringing everything together.

What we’re shouting about is football, but that’s the last little bit that we’re looking at. It’s about creating those safe spaces, creating an environment where people can come down, can enjoy themselves, can actually just explore and experiment with football and the coaches that come in. This is the place where they have a passion for coaching young girls.

But actually they can learn, they can take risks, they can make mistakes. All of us make mistakes, and this is about being in that environment where it’s OK to make a mistake and understanding rather than the elite side of it, where it’s all strict and regimented and everybody looks at it as you know, three points wins and things like that. If someone wants to go on to that, that’s not a problem, but the start of it, and what we’re trying to do, is create local hubs, make them safe, make girls, just come together. Offer opportunities and network.

My hope is that we can have more equality, but let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a whole heap of work that needs to be done and it’s hard work. We need to push on. We’ve seen numbers and we’re only really early starting, but we’ve trained with two or three girls now having 20 in a short space of time. Grow in that seeing people, word of mouth, people coming down, parents feeling happy to leave their girls with us to enjoy football. That’s where we need to look. How powerful football can be for young girls.

00:37:36 Tanya Joseph

And Luca your hope.

00:37:38 Luca Hussain

My hopes are that more young people, regardless of their background, see that a creative career is possible for them, if that’s something that they’re interested in and that they’re given the chance to explore that when they’re young. Not just with the aim of pursuing a career but also just being able to have that space to really grow their confidence figure out who they are, what they like, what they don’t like, and have that choice and those opportunities open to them and that the creative industries see that.

There is a part on them to be able to also create that welcoming environment for young people coming in from more diverse backgrounds and that they’re doing their bit from the inside. The creative industries need to see that is really important, not just because it makes more sense to them as businesses but that we see more diverse team to work smarter and work better.

It’s also part of their responsibility to create more equity and make the system fairer. It’s really important that we see stories told by people who live them, and that we’re seeing more authentic stories told in media and in creative outputs. Things feel like they’re being created by and for the people who have those experiences.

00:39:06 Tanya Joseph

Thank you so much. It’s been a brilliant, brilliant conversation. Huge thanks to Luca and Rachel for sharing their work, their wisdom and their real world impact. You can learn more about Creative Mentor Network and the Rachel Yankey Foundation on the links to the show.

00:39:41 Luca Hussain

Many thanks for having us. Yeah, it’s been great.

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