Welcome to levi roots!

LaToyah McAllister-Jones, Executive Director of St Pauls Carnival welcomes Levi Roots to the board as Chair and reflects on the past year.

September! How did you get here? Today marks the start of that ‘back to school’ feeling and an exciting time for us at St Pauls Carnival as Levi Roots joins us our board of directors as new Chair. 

The announcement was one of the highlights of 2021! Obviously, this is a really exciting development for St Pauls Carnival and we are focused on building on the achievements of the past to ensure a lasting legacy for future generations.

Levi was with us in June this year when we held a socially distanced community event, with guests of honour Barbara Dettering and Roy Hackett in attendance, where we announced that Levi would be joining the team. He spoke passionately at this event about his connection to Bristol and keenness to take the role on; long before he because famous on Dragon’s Den, he 1st sold his sauce on Stapleton Road and Clifton as well as St Nicholas Market. Levi was a regular performer at St Pauls Carnival as a Soundman back in the 70 s and 80s.

As a successful businessman and entrepreneur, a musician and with an innate understanding of the Caribbean Carnival culture, Levi is in a unique position to support St Pauls Carnival as we develop our business model for future sustainability, our  artistic offer and facilitate more socio-economic opportunities for our young people through Carnival.

As we hurtle towards Autumn and as we welcome Levi officially, I find myself looking back at the year so far and also forwards to what is to come.

It’s been a funny old time, hasn’t it? Not quite like last year but another year of managing limitations and expectations. For St Pauls Carnival, the pandemic has proved to be a mixed bag. In Spring, we cancelled our live event once again. I know how disappointing it was for many people that Carnival couldn’t happen this for the 2nd year in a row, but I was grateful for the understanding and support we received from our community. 

Our organisation exists to deliver a Carnival celebrating African Caribbean heritage. Being unable to do this for the last 2 years has been disappointing. However, I am a firm believer in making lemonade out of lemons. It has been an incredibly creative time for St Pauls Carnival. 

As an organisation that relies on the live and direct experience, we’ve had to rethink how we reach out to our audiences. We were the 1st Caribbean Carnival to go digital in 2020 with Spirit Up! United At Home. We also delivered another digital event in 2021, this time collaborating with artists from across the globe, including Trinidad and Tobago and St Lucia to explore how the Caribbean carnival has evolved in different locations.

I’ve been part of a young team that has grown in skill and knowledge as we learned how to take our content online and deliver Carnival in quite a different way than we’ve been used to. It has been a real learning curve for us all and will impact on carnival in the future as we start planning for 2022, which will no doubt, have a digital component. 

We are keen to continue reaching out and putting St Pauls Carnival on an international stage, broadcasting to audiences in the Caribbean as well as the UK.

We’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide range of Bristol-based community artists through our digital programming.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with curators and producers in a different way; collaborating on the vision and delivery of the 2020 Black History Month programme Ketch A Fyah and this year’s Carnival event, Global Carnival; a Cultural Evolution. 

Our education programme has also gone from strength to strength, adapting our Carnival heritage programme to ensure schools were still able to access the dance, drumming and costume-making elements; we created films for each school, find one here!

I am incredibly proud of the team and what we have achieved so far this year. Together with the new-look board of directors, we have adapted to an ever-changing environment and challenged ourselves to do things differently.

Looking forwards, it’s all about 2022! We start to plan the live event as soon as we’re all ‘back to school’. We know everyone is looking forward to being together on the streets of St Pauls once again so keep your eye out on our social media platforms and website for more information as we gear up to what promises to be a fantastic year for events.

This is a truly exciting time to be involved with St Pauls Carnival and I look forward to working with Levi for 2022 and beyond.