Patrick Vernon

In April 2020 after his sister's partner died from the Covid-19 virus, Vernon set up a fundraising initiative called "The Majonzi Fund" which will provide families from Black & Minority ethnicities with access to small financial grants that can be used to access bereavement counselling and organise memorial events and tributes after the social lockdown has been lifted.

In 2019 he was appointed Associate Director of Communities at the Centre for Ageing Better, a National Lottery Community funded charity looking to improve the lives of those approaching later life.

Vernon led a successful campaign for 22 June to be recognized annually as Windrush Day, a national day acknowledging the migrant contribution to UK society, which was officially backed by the British government in 2018.

In May 2018, following his earlier campaign for Windrush Day and his 2013 petition to the British government, Vernon relaunched a petition asking the Prime Minister to recognise June 22 as a national day to commemorate and celebrate migration and migrant communities in Britain. At the height of the Windrush scandal, with revelations about the wrongful detention and deportation of members of the Windrush generation and their children, and following Vernon's campaigning for justice for those affected, including an amnesty on deportations, it was announced by the government that an annual Windrush Day would be celebrated, supported by a grant of up to £500,000, to recognise and honour the contribution of the Windrush Generation and their descendants and to "keep their legacy alive for future generations, ensuring that we all celebrate the diversity of Britain’s history."

Among the outlets for which Vernon writes are The Guardian, The Voice, and Media Diversified. In 2017, the 30th anniversary of Black History Month in Britain, he was appointed as guest editor for Black History Month Magazine.

In 2015 Vernon was caught up in controversy around his concerns that the logo used on a flag to celebrate the Black Country was offensive and insensitive. This led to him being "dragged into an online hate campaign after saying that the flag's chain motif represents an image of an industry which profited from the Transatlantic slave trade."

Vernon served for eight years as a Labour councillor for the Queensbridge ward in the London Borough of Hackney, stepping down in May 2014, when the ward was abolished. He was appointed as chair of the Labour Party's Race Equality Advisory Group in December 2015.

As a film-maker, Vernon's work includes directing and producing A Charmed Life, a documentary about the Caribbean contribution in the UK during World War 2, focusing on Jamaican ex-serviceman Eddie Martin Noble. This led in November 2010 to "Speaking Out and Standing Firm", a programme (developed by Every Generation in partnership with Haringey Library Services) in which Vernon facilitated inter-generational workshops, with young people from North London interviewing war veterans, ex-service men and women from World War 2 and modern-day peacekeeping and international conflicts.

In 2006 Every Generation published When We Ruled, a history of African civilisations by Robin Walker. In 2013 in partnership with Ian Randle Publishers he published Caribbean in Sepia: A History in Photographs 1840–1900, written by Michael Ayer. In addition, Vernon has published a book about the history of pirate radio stations (Master of The Airwaves written by Dave VJ and Lindsay Wesker).

In 2002 Vernon founded Every Generation Media to develop education programmes, publications and films on cultural heritage and family history, with the Every Generation website becoming one of the main sites on family history for African and Caribbean communities in Britain. In 2003 he launched the successful "100 Great Black Britons" campaign, in response to a television series run by the BBC called 100 Great Britons (a list topped by Winston Churchill through public nomination), in order "to raise the profile of the Black contribution to Britain and to challenge the notion of Britishness." The campaign received wide coverage in the national print and television media, with Mary Seacole eventually announced as having been voted the greatest Black Briton.

Patrick Philip Vernon OBE (born 1961) is a British social commentator and political activist of Jamaican heritage, who works in the voluntary and public sector. He is a former Labour councillor in the London Borough of Hackney. His career has been involved with developing and managing health and social care services, including mental health, public health, regeneration and employment projects. Also a film maker and cultural historian, he runs his own social enterprise promoting the history of diverse communities, as founder of Every Generation and the "100 Great Black Britons" campaign. He is also an expert on African and Caribbean genealogy in the UK. He was appointed a Clore Fellow in 2007 and an OBE in 2012.

Patrick Vernon was born in Wolverhampton in the constituency where Enoch Powell was the Member of Parliament, in the West Midlands of England, to Norris and Avis Vernon, who had migrated to the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s. Growing up in the All Saints and Penn Fields areas, Vernon attended schools in Wolverhampton before going on to study law at Manchester Metropolitan University, followed by postgraduate studies as Warwick University. He moved to London in 1989.

Vernon was the first to call for the national celebration of "Windrush Day" on 22 June, to recognise the migrant contribution to UK society, marking the day in 1948 when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing the first big group of post-war migrants from the West Indies to Britain. On being made an OBE in 2012, in recognition of his work to promote health equality for Black and minority ethnic communities, Vernon said: "I am dedicating this honour to my parents who were part of the Windrush Generation; they made a lot of personal sacrifices in coming to Britain and raising my four sisters and me. It is also great to receive this award which also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Independence of Jamaica."

Vernon has a collection of 5,000 historic postcards that he uses in workshops he runs on family history and genealogy. He is the author of a guide to using the National Archives photographic images as a resource for family history, as part of the "Caribbean Through the Lens" project. He is related to singer Jimmy Cliff and has traced his lineage as far back as the 1800s, to a village in Senegal called Kédougou.