Chief Executive

LEAP’s Chief Executive, Tunde Banjoko OBE, is also its founder.  He knew from personal experience just how soul-destroying and depressing it was to want to work but not being able to get work, to want to be able to provide for yourself and your family but instead being dependent on benefits.  From simple origins, one room, 3 desks and no computers, Tunde had no idea that LEAP would eventually become the important resource for disadvantaged people that it is today.

Under Tunde’s stewardship, the organisation grew and is now one of the most successful and inspirational, training and employment organisations in the UK. LEAP has been held up as an example of good practice in a number of government and other publications and our Kensal Green offices usually leaves the visitor with a sense that something more than just helping people into work is going on.

Tunde brought to the UK the powerful STRIVE scheme, an empowerment programme that uses employment as the vehicle, and tackles some of the underlying reasons behind people being unable to find and keep work.  An innovator at heart, Tunde was the driving force behind the development of EMPOWERED, which has just been adopted in one of UK’s most well-known prisons and is now being piloted for some of the vacancies created by the 2012 Olympics.

Tunde regularly gives presentations to the London Business School’s leadership programme participants and has done the same on a PwC programme for their emerging leaders, as well as being a charismatic and convincing public speaker.

Tunde is involved in mentoring black schoolchildren and is passionate about race equality issues.  He has an MSc in Urban Regeneration from UCL.  He was a member of the government’s Children and Young People’s Unit’s external advisory board, was a member of the National Employment Panel’s Minority Ethnic Group and is currently a member on the cross-Governmental Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force’s Ethnic Minority Advisory Group.    He was recognised as a “Man of Merit”, for community work, in September 2002 and received recognition from the then Mayor of London for services to the city.

Tunde was awarded an OBE in the 2008 Queens Birthday Honours List.