Alex Holmes: The Founder Of One Of Britain's Most Impactful Anti-Bullying Charities Tells All

“I think the pain of being bullied lit real passion in me and gave me a real purpose," Alex tells Awallprintss' Safeeyah Kazi.

UK

When you think of what you’d like to have achieved by the time you hit your 30s, for many that goal is tangible, a highly successful career, a nice car and perhaps a house to call your own. For 33-year-old Alex Holmes, his moral compass has driven him to find success in bettering the lives of children, by eradicating schools around the world of bullying.

A former survivor of bullying, Holmes, from Watford, Hertfordshire, has dedicated the last decade to giving young people the power to help their peers via his initiative, Anti-Bullying Ambassadors.

The programme, which he founded at the age of 16, aims to equip children with the toolkit to stand up for those who are bullied and change the way they perceive bullying.

Holmes found himself face-on with bullies growing up, a significant portion of which was racist and homophobic.

Speaking to Awallprintss, Holmes said: “My experience of bullying was at primary school, it was around racism because my dad is black, his side of the family's from Jamaica and then my mum’s side is from Spain, she's white.”

“When I went to primary school, because it was not a very mixed school, I was one of few students who were mixed race and people didn't understand that - and that difference was used against me,” he continued.

“My school didn't deal with it very well. They didn't understand the impact it was having on me. I can remember one teacher in particular telling me, ‘if you don't stop crying, we're going to put you in detention’, which didn't help me at all.”

Thankfully, Holmes revealed the school has since gone on to adopt his Anti-Bullying Ambassadors programme.

Reflecting on his experiences growing up, Holmes added that it’s easy to feel “trapped” at school, because of how much time is spent there as a child – an estimated average of 11,000 hours.

In spite of the impact bullying had on him, Holmes cites his experience as his ultimate driving force to create permanent solution to prevent others from going through what he did.

“I think the pain of being bullied lit real passion in me and gave me a real purpose,” he said.

“I think when you're able to apply something that you know, an experience you feel like you have overcome, you feel stronger from it. There’s nothing better than trying to think about how you can make sure other people don't go through that.

“When I was thinking about what would've made my situation better, that's where I came up with the fact that it was quite lonely. I didn’t have people standing up for me because they didn't feel safe, they didn't feel confident, they didn't have the knowledge or know how to intervene. So it felt like we needed an army of ambassadors to have people that could say, ‘this isn't acceptable.’”

Holmes’ work has not gone unnoticed with a Queen’s Young Leader Award, a Muhammed Ali Humanitarian Award and a place on Forbes 30 Under 30 all among the host of accolades in his repertoire.

Since collecting his Queen’s Young Leader Award at Buckingham Palace in 2017, the Anti-Bullying Ambassadors programme has taken off around the world, having trained over 40,000 young people in nearly 5,000 schools across the UK, Ireland, USA, Greece and France to name a few.

He has also gone on take on the role of Deputy CEO at The Diana Award, a charity dedicated to persevering the late Princess Diana’s belief that young people have the power to change the world. Holmes was first a recipient of the award in 2004 for his anti-bullying work.

Whilst he’s able to recognise the significance behind his reel of awards, Holmes believes his biggest personal accomplishment is his role in changing the dictionary definition of the word “bully.”

A “bully” was previously described as, “a person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.”

The new definition defines a “bully” as, “a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.”

Opening up on the magnitude of this, Holmes explained: “That word weak...we thought that was a real problem. So we started speaking to young people who also agreed with that and we did a campaign where we put pressure on all the dictionary companies to change the definition because we thought it was out of date.

“We did a lot of it on social media. We got people like Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things, Richard Branson and other people that have maybe been affected by bullying and thought it was wrong. We wrote to [the dictionary companies] and in the end, I think it was Collins [English Dictionary], maybe agreed first and then Oxford [English Dictionary]. I think Oxford is the one that Google use so slowly they replaced that. So now, when you look up the word bullying it will no longer be defined as happening people to who are weaker, which we thought was a real triumph.”

Despite the mass impact the initiative has had on schools thus far, he remains convinced his work is far from complete. In Holmes' experience, the process of changing a culture heavily integrated into society is far from a quick-fix.

“Everyone forgets when you try and change culture and change behaviours, it's not overnight,” he said. “So actually, our best [reduced bullying] scores are probably in the schools that have been doing this for five years because it's gone through the school, policies have changed, system have changed and thinking has changed.”

Opening up on his goals for the future, he said: “While the ultimate mission would be to rid schools of bullying, that's not going to happen, because they're just humans. What I would like to be is not needed or put out of a job in the sense that if actually every school was required to have Anti-Bullying Ambassadors. They should be required to have a student element to their anti-bullying work because [right now] it's not law.”

He went on to reveal that his biggest aspiration is to have the programme become an open toolkit with an accessible manual that is translated into the top 100 languages online so people are able to learn from it all over the world.

For more tools and resources on coping with bullying, please visit: https://www.antibullyingpro.com/