I’m attempting a 10 mile (16km) sea swim on 29th August in Devon and raising money for the Cherry Groce Foundation – an organisation set up to empower youth for positive change, promote restorative justice practices and foster community engagement.

I would be delighted if you would consider sponsoring me.

Almost exactly forty years ago, 37-year old Cherry Groce was wrongfully shot by the police in her home in Brixton, London, witnessed by her 11-year-old son, Lee Lawrence and his siblings. Cherry was left paralysed from the waist down. The children were left traumatised.

In April 2011 Cherry eventually died from her injuries having spent 26 years in a wheelchair. The shooting sparked the second Brixton Uprising – an overflow of anger and frustration at the institutional and everyday racism that the Black community faced.

Cherry’s son, Lee Lawrence, established the Cherry Groce Foundation in 2016. The foundation offers a comprehensive range of services, including educational and training programmes aimed at youth violence reduction, the development of resources to enhance police and institutional practices through restorative justice, and the adaptation of storytelling resources from Lee's autobiography for educational purposes. The Foundation also delivers various community initiative projects as well as a community transport service.

I would encourage you to find out more at https://www.cherrygroce.org/.

I first heard about the Cherry Groce Foundation through Meyler Campbell, an organisation that trains people in business/executive coaching. Lee Lawrence graduated from the Meyler Campbell Mastered Programme in 2024 and I have recently completed the same course myself.

With your support, doing this swim offers an opportunity to make a small contribution to enabling the Cherry Groce Foundation to achieve its goals at a time when its work is needed more than ever.

A bit more on the swim: it’s from the seaside town of Dawlish southwards along the coast to Torquay. This, for me is a daunting undertaking, as I’ve never swum 10 miles in one go before. It’s over two miles further than the swim I did last year around the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall. (A huge thank you to all of you who backed me to do that swim and supported the charities Mississippi Center for Justice and Surfers Against Sewage!)

While I have swum up and down the coast just north of Torquay on many occasions, much of this route I know only from seeing it from the train, as it runs alongside the red sandstone outcrops near Dawlish.

To improve my chances of covering the distance, I’ve taken coaching sessions, put in a lot of laps in my local pool and taken advantage of a recent holiday in Normandy to get some time in the sea.

If you’d like to know more, please drop me a line!