Wesley Kerr is a freelance broadcaster and journalist and a keen historian and horticulturalist. He has recently appeared on BBC TV’s  How Britain got the Gardening Bug and presented Radio 4’s series on the Britain in Bloom competition, Wars of the Roses. From 2001- 2008 he has was one of the presenters of the BBC coverage of the Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Shows, specialising in the history of plants, people and places. He has covered over 3000 stories, most in the UK, and also from more than 40 countries in 6 continents. He was BBC News’s first black reporter, reporting on the spot a huge range of stories from the Heysel Stadium tragedy, the Windsor Castle Fire through to the Oklahoma City bomb.

Born in London, Wesley was brought up in Middlesex and Hampshire. He was awarded a Hampshire County Bursary to Winchester College and an Open Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History, graduating with a BA Hons and an MA.

He joined the BBC in 1979 as a trainee researcher then was a  director, producer, reporter and correspondent, on programmes including Panorama, The Book Programme, Nationwide, South-East at Six, Sixty Minutes and London Plus. In the late 80s he spent 4 years as Newsnight’s Arts & Media Correspondent covering theatre, books, movies, music, museums, galleries, TV and newspapers. At BBC News in the 90s he was Education, Social Affairs, Health, New York and Washington Correspondent and reported for most of BBC Radio’s news and current affairs shows. For a decade he was also Royal Correspondent. His live commentary as Elizabeth II returned to the Palace following Diana’s death was used in the Oscar-winning film The Queen. From 1997 he presented and reported for several series of BBC1’s primetime consumer shows; Watchdog Healthcheck, Face Value, On the House, Value for Money and Holiday.

Wesley received the RHS General Certificate in Horticulture in 2004, the year after he went freelance. He has written many articles for publications in the UK, (including The Times, Sunday Times, The Guardian, Evening Standard, Punch and the Times Literary Supplement) and also for periodicals in Jamaica and the USA. From 2004 – 2006 he was a Judge for the National Lottery Awards.

Mike Bieber

Mike Bieber has worked as an investigator for the Local Government Ombudsman since 1999.

After becoming a solicitor in 1972, Mike worked in community development, becoming particularly interested in advice in aid work. Over the next 15 years he helped set up one of the first housing aid centres, became involved with law centres as a volunteer and as a trustee locally and nationally, and was deputy director of the Greater London CAB Service. In between, he was a research fellow for five years at The City University, carrying out contract research for central government into the training and education of staff in housing departments and housing associations. In 1984 he became Assistant Director of Social Services in Hackney; and then joined CancerLink, a national charity providing information and support to those affected by cancer, as Director. He was six years with CancerLink, and also became involved with other self-help organisations in Britain and abroad.

In 1992 Mike left to study History of Art at UCL, and then carried out research at Leicester University into the governance of independent museums. He has worked as a volunteer and in paid work in the museum sector for over ten years, including as a trustee for the London Museums Agency from 2001 to 2004, a trustee of the Ragged School Museum from 1998 to 2008 and a mentor for the Museums Associations AMA since 2002. He is a member of the Museums Association and of ICOM.

Mike was a member of the Community Funds London Awards Committee from 2001 to 2004. Since then he has become a member of a local grant giving charity in London.

Sophie Birshan
Sophie Birshan is a management consultant serving clients in the private, public and non-profit sectors. Previously Sophie was a member of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit where she advised on the strategic challenges facing London, housing and the urban environment, regenerating deprived areas and the role of communities.

Sophie has a particular interest in the performing arts. She was a theatre director at the Stadttheater Konstanz, Germany, where she worked on four sell-out productions; served as head script reader at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, which specialises in international work; and produced a new play about torture on the London fringe in 2002.

Sophie studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and holds a Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, graduating as a Baker Scholar.

Sophie is a fourth generation Londoner, her family having arrived here from Eastern Europe in the late 1890s.

Prakash Daswani, Chief Executive of Cultural Co-operation, is a cultural activist who has worked at the forefront of inter-cultural arts theory and practice in Britain continuously since 1979.

He has conceived, directed and produced several ground-breaking international and inter-faith arts projects involving guest visiting artists from around the world alongside UK-based ones: some 40 world culture festivals; world theatre seasons; conferences on International Cultural Relations and Literature & Exile; and cross-cultural educational residencies. These have featured some 4,000 artists from 75 countries and been attended by around three million people.

With the late Robert Atkins, he set up and ran the Commonwealth Institute's Arts Centre (1980-87) and later founded Cultural Co-operation, an independent arts and education charity in 1987. Together, they were the UK members of EEAC (1980-90), a high-level consortium comprising heads of eight leading world culture institutions in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Britain, that joined forces throughout the year to create and deliver collaborative international arts projects continent-wide.

He served on the Boards of Minority Arts Advisory Service (1985-7), Community Music (1987-9) and Greater London Arts (1988-9), became a graduate of Common Purpose in 2002 and is a Fellow of the RSA. He was UK juror on the EU's Culture 2000 selection panel. In 2002, he qualified as an executive management coach to assist the professional development of creative practitioners in London’s diaspora communities. From 1999-2003, he acted as expert adviser to the Ford Foundation in the Palestinian territories, Zanzibar and Kenya and, since 2008, to the Mayor of London’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage.

He is a graduate in English (Lancaster) and postgraduate in both Arts Administration (City University) and Social Anthropology (London School of Economics), who has written widely, including “The Management of Cultural Pluralism in Europe” (1995) for UNESCO, plus talks and papers (1983-2008) on cultural diversity, global identities and inter-culturalism.

In 2008 the European Cultural Foundation UK Committee nominated him for the inaugural Princess Margriet Award for Cultural Diversity, created to mark the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.