Belonging with Mayor Mohamed Semra
from Fearless Conversations Hosted by Dimitri Antonopoulos
Mohammed Semra was born in Sudan, to the Beja people of Eastern Sudan, and arrived in Footscray as a child. He is now the Mayor of the City of Maribyrnong, the youngest mayor in Australia at present and the first person of sub-Saharan African descent elected mayor in the country. He started out facilitating in youth work through the Centre for Multicultural Youth. In this conversation with Dimitri Antonopoulos, Semra talks about what it takes to lead a community you grew up in. Who gets to be in the room. Why lived experience only counts if it comes first. And what a basketball club can do for a kid who has nowhere else to belong. They are joined near the end by Nina, a Year 9 student from Braybrook College who is Mayor for the Day. They get into: * Growing up Sudanese at home and Australian at school, and never finding a place to be both * Being told to change his name to get elected. * Why basketball was the difference between him and the friends who went another way * Consultation theatre, and what co-design looks like when it starts at the beginning * Stewardship as a leadership practice: making decisions for the next 10 to 20 years * Choosing between two good outcomes, and finding the one everyone can live with * Council’s anti-racism project: 80% of respondents had experienced racism, and only 15% reported it * Nina’s anti-racism student group, and why she wants us to stop putting people into categories Get full access to March First at marchfirst.substack.com/subscribe
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