Campaigner shares her hard-earned life lessons for BBC Maestro’s latest course.

Available 10th November 2022  

“I’m doing this course now because, going back, I felt I wasn’t ready to do this. It took me a while to feel comfortable in talking about what had happened to Stephen, in talking about my feelings. It was too raw at the beginning, too early to process my thoughts to anyone.”

Baroness Doreen Lawrence, OBE, has dedicated her life to campaigning for a fairer and more inclusive society. After her son Stephen was tragically killed in a racist attack in 1993, Doreen found inner strength from one of the darkest places imaginable, and in her search for justice, helped vocalise the experience of those who found themselves in situations not of their own making, highlighting how ordinary people were capable of doing extra ordinary things. In this inspirational insight we learn directly from Doreen as we have never seen her before sharing her hard-earned life lessons.

“Parents will say to me ‘I would not have been able to cope and carry on if my child was murdered’ and I would say exactly the same thing before Stephen died. But I had to carry on, and I want to talk about how I did.”

The BBC Maestro platform features a series of extended, in-depth lessons filmed in 4K with an eclectic mix of prestigious experts, and allows participants to indulge in new areas of learning from the comfort of their own home. The commercial online education platform developed and operated by Maestro Media Ltd offers individual courses which can be purchased for £80.

Baroness Doreen Lawrence’s BBC Maestro course on Finding the Inner Strength offers a deeply personal and human insight into her life and story. Even if viewers are not suffering from bereavement and grief, these hard-earned life lessons provide universal messages of hope and inspiration for many out there who are suffering in their own way. By listening and speaking, Doreen seeks to provide comfort, reassurance and the knowledge that the human spirit is astoundingly resilient. We’re not alone in our journey to overcome what might be holding us back even in dark times. There is no singular right way to heal and grow and we must all find our own path, but sometimes we can look to follow a path already trod in the search for inner strength.

“I think bereavement is something people experience in different ways. Everybody’s different. Even though I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to be for you, just by understanding someone else’s experience, that could help you.”

Spanning over three hours, Finding the Inner Strength looks to send the message that healing is an ongoing journey. “There’s no timeline for grief and I’m still learning.” A journey that is best trod with support from others rather than taken alone, “I’m hoping that it’ll help others to feel comfortable to start adjusting and talking about what has happened to them… There is light to be found in the future, no matter how dark it may seem right now.”

“There’s an old Jamaican saying that ‘you’re likkle but you’re tallawah’, and I think for me it means ‘never underestimate me.’”

Finding the Inner Strength is the latest addition to BBC Maestro's selection of world-class courses. Doreen’s course consists of 23 lessons and is designed for viewers to learn at their own pace. Lessons will be accompanied by extensive course notes which feature additional information from Geoffrey Beattie, Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University, and internationally acclaimed psychologist, author and broadcaster.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

• Finding the Inner Strength is available from 10 November on www.bbcmaestro.com
• The course costs £80 for lifetime access to Doreen Lawrence’s 23 lessons and comprehensive downloadable notes
• The 23 lessons include – A Need To Help, Channelling Anger, Therapy, Coping Strategies, Imposter Syndrome, A Meaningful Life, and Keeping Perspective

About Baroness Doreen Lawrence  

Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE, was born in Jamaica in 1952. She emigrated to England aged nine and completed her education in London before becoming a bank worker. She is the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. She and Stephen’s father Neville Lawrence founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in 1998 to promote a positive community legacy in their son’s name.

In 1999, after years of campaigning by the Lawrence family, a wide-ranging judicial inquiry was established to investigate the circumstances of Stephen’s death. It concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, one of the primary causes of their failure to solve the Stephen Lawrence case.In the aftermath of the inquiry, Doreen Lawrence continued to campaign for justice for her son as well as for other victims of racist crime.

In 2003 she was awarded the OBE for services to community relations, and was made a life peer in 2013. She has been selected to sit on panels within the Home Office and the Police Service and is a member of both the board and the council of the organisation Liberty and patron of hate crime charity, Stop Hate UK.

About BBC Maestro

BBC Maestro launched in October 2020 to phenomenal success. The first four courses attracted more than one million people to the service, with thousands signing up to learn from their favourite Maestro. Whether you’re a novice or an amateur enthusiast, BBC Maestro allows you to indulge in your area of passion from the comfort of your own home and learn from the experts. Each course is beautifully filmed in 4K and offers several hours of content, broken down into 14 to 40 easily digestible lessons accompanied by downloadable course notes filled with hints, tips and a breakdown of each course.

Doreen Lawrence is the latest Maestro, joining Lee Child, Edgar Wright, Mark Ronson, Alan Moore, Jancis Robinson, Malorie Blackman, Julia Donaldson, Peter Jones, David Walliams, Gary Barlow, Marco Pierre White, Vineet Bhatia, Pierre Koffmann, Richard Bertinet and Line of Duty creator, Jed Mercurio. And coming soon are Sir Billy Connolly, Carol Ann Duffy, Sir Tim Rice and more – all imparting wisdom, expertise and industry secrets.

BBC Maestro taps into the fast-growing space of e-learning – because of the way technology has revolutionised teaching and learning, lessons no longer must be confined to the classroom. In 2020, the number of people using online learning videos rose dramatically, with an estimated 200 million users worldwide. The global ‘Mass Open Online Courses’ market size is expected to increase from $3.9 billion in 2018 to $20.8 billion by 2023.

BBC Maestro is a commercial platform developed and operated by Maestro Media Ltd under licence from BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. BBC is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence.

BBC Studios is a commercial subsidiary of the BBC Group with profits (EBITDA) of £226 million on sales of £1.6bn (21/22). Able to take an idea seamlessly from thought to screen and beyond, its activities span content financing, development, production, sales, branded services, and ancillaries across both its own productions, and programmes and formats made by high-quality UK independents, with three-quarters of its revenues from non-BBC customers including Discovery, Apple and Netflix. Around 2,400 hours of award-winning British programmes made by the business are internationally recognised across a broad range of genres and specialisms, with brands like Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars, Top Gear, Bluey and Doctor Who. BBC.com, BBC Studios’ global digital news platform, has 139 million unique browser visits each month.

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