GLEAMED Mediators - Helen Menezes
For more than 18 years, Helen ran the Cedar Centre, a multi-cultural community centre on the Isle of Dogs in East London. Having founded it in 1989, she worked to establish it as a pioneering and vibrant centre, achieving its aims of helping people to improve their lots by helping themselves, with an emphasis on building up their self-confidence and self-reliance, rather than doing everything for them. In this position, Helen dealt directly with business leaders and other major funders, as well as the hundreds of people who used the centre every week.
Brought up and educated in South East London, Helen took her degree at New Hall, Cambridge, before training as a secondary school teacher in English and Drama. She taught O-level and A-level English at a mixed comprehensive school in Swanley, Kent, before taking a few months off to travel around India. She joined Toynbee Hall, a long-established charity in the East End of London, in 1987, as Education co-ordinator and assistant to the Warden and Chef Executive. Here, she established and developed educational work for the charity, teaching English and communication skills to adults, including Bangladeshi and other ethnic minority students. It was from this work that the Cedar Centre was formed and, with Toynbee Hall’s blessing, became an independent organisation.
As the Cedar Centre organiser, Helen raised funds and managed a series of projects. Her duties included training and organising staff, volunteers and Centre users; teaching English to people of all ages; piloting new projects; working with a range of groups from the private, statutory and voluntary sectors; advising on community development in other groups; negotiating contracts and working with other agencies.
In addition to this, Helen wrote and taught basic access courses for Tower Hamlets College; she edited and produced The Islander, a bi-monthly community newspaper with a circulation of 8000, for 18 months and she supervised youth work students from George Williams College and St Martin’s, Lancaster. She researched and wrote reports on community development for the Aberfeldy Project in Poplar and Toc H in Whitechapel, East London. She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster and undertook a Churchill Fellowship to study community development in Bangladesh and the USA. She is a former trustee of Friends for Khasdobir, and continues to help to raise funds for their ‘Schools under the Sky’ project in Bangladesh.
Helen has trained and qualified as a civil mediator, with the Civil Mediation Council. She also works as a volunteer mediator for Tower Hamlets Mediation Service. In addition, Helen teaches English and communication skills to adults, runs music sessions with local groups of various ages and provides study support for children, young people and adults.
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