012 Being purpose driven with Lorraine Lewis of The Lewis Foundation

SHOW NOTES: I launched The Elephant in the Room podcast last year as a part of my learning journey to be more intentional and purpose driven. For most parts I love it, but as any podcast host will admit, it is hard work. It requires discipline to turn up week after week, and just the sheer number of hours it takes to put an episode together, can sometimes be a drag. However, I chose to do it, because I love it. My guest for the 12th episode Lorraine Lewis knows a thing or two about turning up day after day at all hours towards a cause she is committed to. She is the co-founder of The Lewis Foundation an award winning charity, that provides free gifts and support to adults going through cancer treatment in hospitals around the midlands. During the first lockdown last year Lorraine and her husband Lee received a personal thanks from the Prime Minister for their hard work, and were awarded the Points of Light Award. Lorraine balances her work at the foundation with her work as Criminal Lawyer working for the CPS. She is passionate about changing the world and she is doing it one step at a time. In this freewheeling conversation she talks about her journey to setting up the charity; her work at the CPS; her identity, the term ‘BAME’; about finding her purpose and her inspiration amongst other things. Subscribe to the show on any of your favourite platforms iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts. Listen to the full episode here Memorable passages from the conversation: 👉🏾 So I've always known I wanted to be a lawyer, probably far around seven/eight and I think because my parents used to love watching those crime programs on TV, So I was there at home watching it and that's what got me into it. It just seemed really cool. That just fired it into me from the age is definitely what I wanted to do. What I did find is when I would share that like when you had careers advisor talks at school, they would say well, no, you can't do that, pick something else. Basically because you're a woman and you're black, so you're not going to be able to do that. At the time, it really shocked me. And I remember going home and telling my parents and they could not believe it either. They just went into the school and had some words. But more importantly, they told me that don't let anybody tell you, you can't be, or do anything you want to do and go for it. So even though people are telling you not to that you can't get there but you can find a way. And I think that was through my whole time, me having an idea of being, I know I want to be a barrister. All through school when I kept getting told the same thing. If anything it actually drove me. It made me more determined to want to do it. To prove people wrong and prove my teachers wrong, who said I couldn't do it. And it was a challenge actually, because there's nobody in my family who went to Uni before. There was nobody, any of us knew who had anything to do with law. And it was about me taking those steps to put myself out there and contact people and write to people and persuade them to give me work experience, to support me. That enabled me to make that whole progress in my journey to be able to get my quantification in 2007. And I qualified as a barrister and it wasn't easy but I'm glad that I did Imagine if I was one of those people that felt like. I might as well give up, or my parents had turned round to me and said actually that is right you might as well just leave it. It could easily have gone that way. So I think it's really sad when you do hear stories about people getting told they can't do something, based on the colour of their skin and who they are, what their gender is. Because that could be that just one thing that could stop somebody actually fulfilling their dreams. So it was a long process, but that’s what I wanted to do. 👉🏾 My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer in 2010. A diagnosis that came completely out of the