Ben Lindsay OBE

Keynote Speaker

Ben Lindsay OBE's Biography 

Ben Lindsay OBE is founder of Power The Fight, launched in 2019, Power the Fight is an award-winning charity which tackles violence affecting young people. PTF creates long-term solutions for sustainable change and acts as a link between the community and policy makers.

Winner of the Charity Times 2022 Rising Leader Award and one of The Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 London’s most influential people for 2018, Ben is an experienced presenter, trainer and facilitator with more than 20 years spent working with high risk young people in the field of gangs and serious youth violence.

Ben began his career developing programmes in some of the most challenging estates in London, England (Brixton, Clapham and Lewisham). In 2003 he became a learning mentor at a primary school in the borough of Lewisham, South East London before joining the Lewisham Youth Offending Service, where he worked in a number of roles, including leading the early intervention team.

While at Lewisham, Ben developed several successful programmes including the ground-breaking knife crime prevention programme Double Edge for offenders of knife crime, which was featured in the ‘Gang and Group Offenders – A Practitioner’s Handbook of Ideas & Interventions’ published by the London Criminal Justice Board.

In 2010 Ben developed the gangs and serious youth violence strategy for Camden Council and then went on to work for the mental health charity MAC-UK leading their mini mac project.

Ben was Chair of the Greenwich Independent Advisory Group until 2016. Between 2016 -2020, Ben was lead pastor at Emmanuel New Cross in South East London. He currently sits on the Mayor of London Sadiq Kahn’s Violence Reduction Unit reference group and on the cross-party Youth Violence Commission.

His first book, the No1 Bestseller, We Need To Talk About Race – Understanding the Black Experience in White Majority Churches was released in July 2019 through SPCK Publishing.

Ben is also a PhD candidate at Durham University researching Cultural Sensitivity in teaching and the impact on the flourishing of Black Caribbean Boys.

Ben was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first New Year’s Honours List for services to communities in SE London.