Assembly Speaker, 3 October
Daisy Srblin: CEO Young Camden Foundation
Last week at assembly ex Camden student Daisy Srblin, now Chief Executive of Young Camden Foundation came to talk to us about her start in life and how she got to where she is now. She grew up living in Camden, originally an immigrant, with her mother with little family income, but Daisy never let that get her down or dampen her academic aspirations. Whilst in the Sixth Form, Daisy worked extremely hard and really enjoyed learning. She also became involved in the extra curricular life of the school and was voted Sixth Form head girl by her peers. Daisy was the first person in her family to attend university. She went to Durham University to study history and although she had a rocky start she still pushed on and graduated in 2013 practically at the top of her class. She showed us a picture of herself with her mum on Graduation Day and told us how proud her mum was of all her daughter had achieved.
After uni, Daisy went into Finance and worked in the City for a time where she learned a lot but did not enjoy it very much. She then joined the Fabian society but she unexpectedly experienced a certain amount of sexism and eventually realised that politics, which she had always been passionate about, was not actually the route she wanted for her life.
Following on from this, Daisy worked in a number of different jobs until she ended up where she is now, CEO of the Young Camden Foundation is a registered charity set up to address the growing uncertainty of long-term investment in the children and young people sector in Camden and the need to build more cross-sector partnerships. They work with organisations to develop new approaches to supporting young people. Daisy loves her job; she only became CEO earlier this year and is really looking forward to the challenge of making YCF the best it can be.
She showed us a very interesting illustration of the difference between what people think success looks like, ie. a straight upward travelling arrow, and what it really entails, which is a trajectory with lots of tangents, diversions and retracing of steps as it slowly moves upward towards success. The message could not have been clearer! Daisy finally outlined the central message of her talk which was to always have confidence in ourselves no matter what our backgrounds, and she ended with a very strong feminist message, which was that in order to achieve that confidence she had always modelled herself to ‘the confidence of a mediocre white man”. I am sure her talk will definitely stick with us all.
