Black History Month profile:
Dionne Gravesande
Dionne Gravesande has decades of experience working with churches and national and international non-governmental organisations. She plays a leading role in Christian Aid’s work on global partnerships and ecumenical collaborations in the areas of inequalities, peacebuilding, gender and climate. She is also academically trained in theology, international relations, community development and business administration.
Dionne is a member of the New Testament Church of God and has served on its National Youth and Christian Education Board. She is co-chair for the National Church Leaders Forum, an organisation committed to facilitating a Black Christian voice in the UK, and chair of Tipping Point North South, a co-operative that supports and initiates creative, campaign-driven projects that advance the global justice agenda. She is a regular columnist for Keep the Faith, Britain’s leading Black & multi-ethnic Christian community focused publication.
Faith for the Climate’s director, Dr Shanon Shah, had the pleasure of sitting down with Dionne for a very meaningful conversation on Wednesday, 3 September 2025, at St John’s Church, Waterloo, a stone’s throw from the Christian Aid office. In part one of this interview, Dionne reflects on how her multifaceted work and personal reflections have informed her analysis of the interconnections between climate and racial justice. This transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Part 1
Shanon: How did you come to incorporate climate into your worldview, your analysis and your work at the intersections of faith and racial justice?
Dionne: It’s mostly through Christian Aid. My first role in Christian Aid was back in 2020 as an advisor on Black majority churches partnerships. In the early 2000s, when Christian Aid thought about its identity as a UK church-based agency, and looking at the diversity of churches around – not just in London but across England – it was felt that it was under-represented in terms of Black-led churches. Christian Aid wanted to change that reality, and so that was my very first role back then. I did that for three years and went on to head up the Churches and Young Peoples Team, a time I thoroughly enjoyed as I worked and networked across sponsoring churches in Great Britain and Ireland on a shared mission of ‘Give, Act and Pray’.
Around 2012, I moved on to head up the church advocacy team, with my main motivation being to strengthen the organisational ecumenical advocacy to influence public policy, social attitudes, and institutional practices in ways that reflect the Gospel’s call for justice, peace, and human dignity, drawing legitimacy from the church’s moral voice, collective witness, and historic role as a conscience in society.
I learned much in my first decade of working alongside church leaders, congregations and Christian Aid partners in other parts of the world. For example, in 2005, a trade justice campaign was launched with lots of activity in the UK and solidarity actions in Ghana. In particular, Christian Aid partners organised a day of action in the capital city of Accra. A group of UK church leaders participated – four in total, mostly from the Black Pentecostal churches. We joined them for the day of activism. It was powerful to see people taking to the streets to speak out on unfair international trading rules.
I recall the day we visited a poultry farmer named Lawrence. He showed us around his compound. He had about 10 or so chicken coops that would usually be filled with live chickens, hundreds of chickens. But at that time he had only three coops with chickens, since many had died due to diseases, meaning reduced livelihood [for him]. Lawrence articulated how and why unfair international trading rules simply did not work for him as a farmer in Ghana. And he said:
‘I am no different to you. I have dreams and ambitions for myself. I have dreams and ambitions for my children. I want them to go to school here in Ghana. I want them to have a career, to be able to achieve exactly what you have achieved where you are. I do not want to send them to Europe or the US. I want them here with their family, and I want them to make a life and contribute to my economy in Ghana. But here’s why I can’t do that. Because it seems that your government has more influence with my government than I do as a citizen. How is that fair?’
He then looked at us and said,
‘If you feel you have come here to make my life any better, you haven’t. But if you feel you have any influence, what I ask you to do is to go back to your own government and influence them. Find better ways to hear from your own people but also listen to us, too. If you can do that, then I am grateful. Beyond that, don’t keep me dependent on an aid system.’
Do not shrink yourself to fit into spaces that were never designed for you.
His point underscores the importance of public advocacy and witness to a life of dignity and equality. So whether it makes me comfortable or uncomfortable, ultimately it is about political and public advocacy. My faith is telling me that when I look into the eyes and the face of another, I am looking at a part of myself, a member of one human family.
Shanon: And is this the thread that runs through everything that you do now? I know you’re involved in NCLF, you’re now chair of Tipping Point North South, and you write for Keep the Faith. There’s also your work with the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race.
Dionne: Yes, I think you’re right. My current roles as chair of Tipping Point and co-chair of NCLF help me to reframe how we can humanise not just climate, but many other interconnected injustices, right? What connects all these things together? While I am involved with different organisations the thing that tugs at my heart, why I say yes, is that at the centre of these different causes are people. It’s the vision around equity, justice and human dignity.
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother as a child, who would constantly remind me, ‘Do not allow any of the descriptions of yourself to limit your ambitions.’ My grandmother came to the UK in 1961, my mother followed in 1963 and then subsequently met my father. I was born some years later. My grandmother, who grew up on a small island in the Caribbean, Nevis, she was never limited in her vision and she refused to allow patriarchal thinking to limit her as a woman, whether in the Caribbean or in the UK. When faced with horrendous racism, she still found ways to reinforce her affirmation of herself. As a child growing up, she helped to instil that mentality in me, although I did not know this at the time. She would quietly affirm, ‘Dionne, remember who you are. Remember you matter.’ It became a counter-narrative to negative feelings around worth and ability. My grandmother was a formidable woman of faith – her motto of ‘you can overcome’ inspired me to work with a purpose to make a difference.
This golden thread runs through my psyche today. Do not shrink yourself to fit into spaces that were never designed for you.
Shanon: Yeah. I heard a young British Muslim woman activist say recently, ‘You know, there’s sexism, there’s Islamophobia, there’s racism, there’s all of that. But the combination of my faith and all these things is my superpower. I can go anywhere and do anything that I want, and I know that I am powerful.’
Dionne: Yes, And I’m better able to say that without apology. Since my time at Christian Aid I’ve found a language that falls between professional development language and theological discourse. I studied theology, partly to help me better understand the Gospel message for myself and in doing so, I learnt Biblical text is really powerful, if you have belief.
Shanon: How would you describe the connection between climate justice and racial justice? What does this mean to you?
Dionne: The connection is clear in that climate injustice and racism come from the same root. So the harm that is being done to the environment stems from the perception that the earth’s resources can be owned by private individuals or corporations, and there’s no sense of care or of looking earth’s resources. ‘Looking after’ is not strong enough. It’s about being intentional so that the survival of humanity is bound up with the survival of the planet, and thereby all of Creation.
And it’s the same arguments for racial justice, the sense that some people are just not seen nor valued. We are still living with the unresolved history of the transatlantic slavey system that enslaved millions of African people. As a society we still haven’t quite yet worked out how some of these wrongs can be set right. Reparations are one important avenue yet to be fully explored. As much as there is a gospel for the poor, there must be a gospel for the rich. Wealth achieved during transatlantic slave trading years was obtained because generations of people were dehumanised and traded as personal property, and today’s injustices continue to happen because somehow, we haven’t learned the historic damage and legacy of structural racism, power, consumption and greed. So, for me, these two things, racial injustice and climate injustice, share the same roots. They come from unjust, embedded systems and structures that I would say are profoundly wicked because they do not benefit anyone beyond those who have invested in it for their self-interest.
And in all the campaigns, all the issues that I have been a part of, wanting to see a change, nothing is ever handed over. Power is not ceded. You have to win those arguments. You have to win the narrative. You have to win the current people in positions of power over, you have to win and continually persuade them that justice and equality for all is the right thing to do. And even when you’ve done that, it doesn’t mean that it will last a lifetime. It might last until the next administration.
Power is not ceded. You have to win those arguments. You have to win the narrative. You have to win the current people in positions of power over, you have to win and continually persuade them that justice and equality for all is the right thing to do. And even when you’ve done that, it doesn’t mean that it will last a lifetime. It might last until the next administration.
I was recently away at a wedding in Kent. I drove there and it’s a route that I’ve done many times before. But this time the roads were draped with the St George’s flag. What is, I thought, this appeal about belonging to a specific identity? Is there a broader, wider narrative that is inclusive and is common to more communities? Do we not bleed the same red blood? I think we have to find different ways to keep that message alive without being too philosophical or rose-tinted, like somehow we’ve always got it right, but now suddenly it’s all going wrong. We haven’t always got it right, and surely we should learn from where we’ve got it dramatically wrong in order to safeguard ourselves not going down a familiar racist route again.
For me, the model of Christ as the servant king is an interesting one. Is there something there to learn from that? How are we who have access to power using it to serve the greater good without compromising our credibility? I do think we have to tussle with it. It’s about translating what is said into what is done. It becomes, ‘So what does that look like?’ How do you put that in place, block by block, and how do you bring people with you on that? Because some of these changes will take a while to embed.
In my role as chair at Tipping Point North South, I have the opportunity to work with others to address three things together at a structural level – poverty, racism and militarism – and this is brought together in the work of the MLK Global Campaign.
Poverty is contrary to the fundamental principles of Christianity, which emphasises love, compassion, and justice for all. Poverty is not only a social problem but also a spiritual one, as it leads to a loss of dignity, self-worth, and hope.
Shanon: In one of your articles for Keep the Faith, you said that the Black church can model a prophetic voice out of ‘a holy dissatisfaction with the status quo’. I love how you put that, because it brings together the issues of racial and climate justice so eloquently.
Dionne: Yes, I often talk about righteous anger, that comes from my understanding of poverty as a pervasive and complex social problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Christianity recognises the reality of poverty and calls on believers to work towards alleviating it. This is because poverty is contrary to the fundamental principles of Christianity, which emphasises love, compassion, and justice for all. Poverty is not only a social problem but also a spiritual one, as it leads to a loss of dignity, self-worth, and hope.
In my faith tradition, justice is the holy grail. To have a society that is at peace, where people can flourish, means that justice must be at the heart of how things are done. I’m not just talking about what we need. It is the ‘how we do what we do’. And when justice is present, all representatives of a modern society have a seat at the table.
In many of my Keep the Faith pieces, there’s a golden thread of quotes and lessons from civil rights leader Martin Luther King. I’ve learnt you have to work alongside a whole body of people to build a movement, hence the body of work that’s been done by Tipping Point around the MLK campaign, around where his thinking was at the point when he was assassinated. And interestingly, if Deborah Burton (co-founder of Tipping Point North South) was here, [she’d say] the Poor People’s Campaign was the project he was building up. It’s interesting that he was assassinated just as he was starting to crystallise that vision of justice. It was an agenda that spoke to class, race, gender and power.
Shanon: I agree. The Poor People’s Campaign was an example of him tying together very powerful analysis about colonialism, racism and capitalism on a global scale, as well as on a national scale. For me, in my role at Faith for the Climate, I also love that he kept forging friendships with activists and leaders of other faiths. He was friends with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He was friends with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Dionne: I spent some time in Sri Lanka, and we happened to be there during one of their bank holidays. We were just outside Colombo. And our partner there took us up on a mountain. And there was a massive statue of the Buddha. God knows how they built it – it’s a massive, incredible structure. Local people used the day to do a pilgrimage mountain walk. They would stop along the way to rest, reflect, gather with others and have lunch. I was completely fascinated with all of this. I too did my own pilgrimage work and I rested near a set of caves. I was told once upon a time, Buddhist monks lived in these cave-like dwellings. I entered and recalled seeing inscriptions and drawings on the walls. I also remember how I felt – the space felt sacred and peaceful. It made me feel that whatever this space was, it made me feel spiritually connected. The best of any faith tradition will remind us of our connections. However you choose to find humanity and our common root, you will find God’s Shalom and a wholeness for all.
End of Part 1
In the next part, Dionne shares more about her joys, challenges and inspirations.