Migrant Leaders: Verian work experience

I'm Elham Fardad and I'm the founder and CEO of the charity, Migrant Leaders. Migrant Leaders is a development programme for young first and second generation migrants as well as all disadvantaged young people across the UK. Verian is a world leading, independent and purpose LED agency, providing evidence creation, research, evaluation and communication services to our clients. Our clients include government departments, public agencies, institutions, in fact, anybody within the public realm, and we are helping our clients solve the next generation of policy challenges.

Our Migrant Leaders mentees will also learn during the course of this Verian internship the sort of research, analytics and skills needed for Verian to deliver their work to their clients. We've been working with Migrant Leaders now for five years and I'm incredibly proud of the relationship that we've built up with the charity. Working with Migrant Leaders allows us to ensure that we are opening ourselves to all sectors of society, to understand the kind of career that they can have with an agency such as Verian.

I've been involved in the working motion programme with Migrant Leaders for the last three years. I initially began as a mentor, and have been a coordinator for the last two years. It's been great seeing the programme grow here at Verian. It's been great seeing the interns sort of think about Social Research as a viable career option, and sort of considering applying to the graduate scheme. So for me, working with Verian was really interesting and particularly the Behavioural Science team really stood out to me; seeing how it's applied to public policy and social research is something that I'm very, very interested in and I can't wait to find out more as well.

I moved to the UK two years ago, which is when I first found out about the Migrant Leaders organisation. There was a general request to be a volunteer, to be a mentor on the programme that they run with young people. I read up about it and was fascinated by the work that they do. And so now finding out about the long standing partnership we have with Migrant Leaders and Verian, I had to put up my hand to be involved.

coordinator and half and in some way, well, I enjoyed the most was letting how to speak to people because we did that through a focus group. And I also just enjoyed the chance to speak to a lot of people. We've got the chance to to speak to Craig, who's the CEO and we also got the chance to speak to our mentors too. So we felt a lot of support throughout.