Dr. Dwain Neil OBE
Dr. Dwain Neil
Chairman, Reach Society
Chairman, Reach Society
Dr. Dwain Anthony Neil was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2019 for services to the British African Caribbean community. He was the managing director of Leriko & Associates (founded 2002), which provided social research, project management, executive coaching, mentoring & motivation and recruitment management consultancy. Previously he was director, operations & performance management, for two years at Focus Consultancy Ltd (Oct 2000 to Sept 2002).
Dr. Dwain Neil OBE
He also enjoyed twenty-one years of commercial experience in Shell Chemicals International as a global accounts manager and latterly as global recruitment manager. He had also been a regular speaker at diversity conferences focused on public and private sector issues in the UK and Holland since 1994.
In June 2010 he was appointed Non Executive Member of the Board, University of Hertfordshire, for a three year term. Early 2009 he was invited to become a Reader on the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher & Further Education. Late 2007 he was appointed non-executive director to the Board of BTEG, which is a national training and enterprise charity; where he served for more than 10 years.
Reach Society was conceived by Donald Palmer, Rob Neil OBE and Dr. Dwain Neil OBE who discussed their concerns about the government’s decision to end the grant funding of the national REACH role model programme after three years. Each of them had been involved with the programme and saw its positive impact on Black boys and young Black men; and so they knew that something needed to be done to maintain this work that was transforming young lives.
Once they had conceived a model for Reach Society they lead a series of conversations with serving role models in order to identify other professional Black men who felt the same way; to test whether they would choose to continue to help boys and young men from their cultural backgrounds; and test whether they could work with the Reach Society model. In this way a movement of Black professional men choosing to help boys and young men was initiated.
The Reach Society’s vision is to ensure that every Black boy and young Black man becomes aware of the Reach Society, and is able to make a positive connection with one or more of its role models of Black professional men.
The Black community is rich in male pioneers and achievers; and the Reach Society ambition is to make it easy for our boys and young men to see them, to hear from them, to touch them and to be inspired by them; and in so doing Reach Society will nurture and increase their appetite and drive for self-development and achievement from an early age.
