Ealing Borough Residents Feature in New Year's Honours

Anthropologist, bank worker, guide leader and teacher awarded

Laura Bear. Picture: The British Academy

A number of Ealing borough residents from a wide range of endeavours featured in the recently announced New Year's Honours List.

There was an MBE for Ealing-based Laura Bear who is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. The award was for services to Anthropology and work the Covid-19 Pandemic.

The 56-year-old academic is an influential anthropologist who specialises in the anthropology of the economy, infrastructures and time. She has made a significant contribution to the COVID-19 response by using her expertise to inform how policy can support vulnerable households.

Since April 2020 she has served on the SPI-B SAGE sub-committee and the ethnicity sub-group of SAGE and she has also been advising MHCLG on the community champions policy.
An expert on India, she has carried out fieldwork in the country for more than twenty years.

Her latest book, Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River (2015), exemplifies her cross-disciplinary approach and her ability to extract policy relevant lessons from case studies.

She proposes a 'social calculus', which measures policy according to the qualities of the social relations it generates and the ability it creates to plan for the future among precarious communities. This has led to comparative research on communities along the Thames in the UK and into local experiments in cooperative and post-growth economies in rural Japan. Her goal in all of these projects is to build an innovative practice of the public good that can renew communities and citizen-state relations.

Extending her work on the practices of the public good, her current research focuses on the unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable UK communities.

She is co-leading an LSE Anthropology research group on the theme of 'Innovations in Care: Supporting Vulnerable Households during the Covid-19 Pandemic.' The group is mapping existing care networks, innovations in social support, near-term stressors and long-term consequences of the pandemic to unpick how households are receiving new policies, what the consequences would be of measures and communications for vulnerable households and how to prepare vulnerable households for the longer-term uncertain future.

39-year-old Sobia Nawaz from Southall has been given an MBE for services to Financial Services and her Community during COVID-19

She is the Customer Service Manager at Santander’s branch in Hounslow and travelled to work throughout the COVID-19 crisis to ensure that customers could access the financial services they needed.

The compassion, level-headedness and community spirit with which Sobia responded to the COVID-19 crisis has made her a role model for her colleagues in Santander.

39-year-old Sobia Nawaz from Southall

She was also one of the first members of staff to take their own initiative to go well above and beyond their normal duties, by reaching out to vulnerable customers to check on their wellbeing and offering whatever support she could to help them through the crisis. For example, she was key to several food drive events within the branch where food and other essentials were delivered to those who could not get to supermarkets.

Her response was so impactful because it was built upon the time and care she had taken since joining the team in Hounslow to build relationships with her customers so she knew where the help was most likely to be needed.

Richard Owen, Head of Branches, Santander UK said, “To receive an award like this is outstanding, and true testament to the hard work and dedication Sobia has shown to her customers and colleagues over the past fifteen years working at Santander.

“This MBE honour came as a complete surprise to Sobia but it’s evident from the work she did during challenging covid times, that she went above and beyond for her most vulnerable customers by arranging extra support, running food banks, carrying out home visits, helping those who had lost loved ones and supporting customers who were the victims of domestic abuse. A huge congratulations to Sobia from us all for her award.”

Beverley Tremayne who is a Brownies and Guides leader in Hanwell was given the British Empire Medal (BEM). She has been running a group at St. Thomas the Apostle, Boston Road for over 30 years. The award was for her services to Girlguiding and Trefoil, which is a form of guiding for adults, particularly during the pandemic.

Ragini Patel, a 50-year-old teaching assistant at Tudor Primary School in Southall, who lives in Northolt, has been given the BEM for services to the community in Northolt particularly during Covid-19. She has made a significant contribution through extensive volunteering. She is heavily involved in pastoral care and the development of the children at her school, where she has worked for 14 years, in particular working with the parents of children who struggle with behavioural difficulties. For 5 years, she has been the English as an Additional Language (EAL) lead at the primary school. Through this, she has developed programmes and classes for both parents and children for whom English is not their first language, and works with other schools in the local area.

In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Tes Classroom Support Assistant of the Year Award, demonstrating the significant contribution that she has made within the school and local community.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she was a volunteer at Compassion London, an initiative founded during Covid-19 to provide catering to those in need of support. She prepared and delivered meals across London to NHS workers, families and children in need, and the homeless.
She also volunteered four times a week at the newly established Southall food distribution service, a service provided by the Southall Community Alliance, established for families in Southall who had to self-isolate as a result of Covid-19 and also helps out at the Ealing Soup Kitchen.

She is also a volunteer activity co-ordinator at Lakeside, Middlesex Hospital, and works within the mental health team and volunteers for the Ealing Advice Service and the Felix Project, the London-based food redistribution waste charity.

In addition, she helps migrant members of the community in temporary accommodation by sourcing household items and food parcels.

If there are any other local people who have been awarded and we have neglected to include please let us know by emailing editor@ealingtoday.co.uk.

January 6, 2022