Shamsher Chohan
Creative Director, Communities Inc
2025
Shamsher Chohan is the Creative Director at Communities Inc, a not for profit organisation in the UK and has worked with a range of diverse communities experiencing discrimination, prejudice and disadvantage for over 35 years.
Her sense of social injustice began when was a student in London in the mid 80’s when a number of her gay friends became infected with HIV, she became one of the first volunteers that the Terrence Higgins Trust recruited and worked to raise awareness and provide support to those affected for the next 13 years. She presented her work at a number of international and Asia and Pacific AIDS conferences, leaving eventually when she felt a complacency and lack of empathy had set in amongst other professionals that had no personal experience. This became the foundation of her work to come.
She has worked community groups develop and grow their services to local communities to address unmet needs. This includes work with women’s, LGBT+, disability, race and religious groups. She was a founding member of a national black infrastructure organistion in the UK, giving a voice to diverse black communities in influencing government policy and resources.
After playing a key role regionally and nationally advocating for disenfranchised communities she founded Communities Inc in 2011.
In 2013 Communities Inc started raising awareness of hate crimes and educating people on what they could do and where they could access support. But giving people information was not enough so after the EU Referendum in 2016 resulted in a spike in reported hate crimes she started exploring the role of bystanders. This started with encouraging people that witnessed hate crimes to report them providing valuable data to agencies, and this was the beginning of what became Stand by Me, in 2017.
Following a pilot and national roll-out of Stand by Me, both funded by Google.org, Communities Inc wanted to do more to stop hate crimes from occurring so they changed the focus to workplaces, neighborhoods and educational establishments to address prejudice and discrimination.
Shamsher now works with police authorities, local authorities, community groups, schools, colleges, universities, businesses and anywhere there are people!
Stand by Me is about empowering people that may witness any form of hostility, prejudice and inappropriate conduct, happening in their environment to act, respond, intervene.
This bystander intervention program allows everyone to play a role in creating safer and more inclusive environments and provides a range of interventions, from which there is something that everyone can find to do. She also developed Stand by Her to address sexism and misogyny and Microaggressions Matter to help people nip negative attitudes and behaviours in the bud.
She is passionate about empowering others to take more control, gain a voice and have their needs met.
Communities Inc are one of the longest training providers of Bystander Intervention training in the UK and were awarded the Upstanding Organisation Award (for tackling hatred, intolerance and prejudice) in 2016 in the first ever UK National Hate Crime Awards.
This cannot be thought of as a conference or a summit. The stakes are simply too high and the data/conversation and methods to drive action more valuable/motivating than any gathering I have attended. I took more than 100 pages of notes and have shared them with my CBS News leadership team, anchors, producers, and correspondents. Nothing about this gathering was easy. The agony around this topic is real. But no one curious about it could ask for a more devoted, rational, or unflinching look into this dark but decipherable world.
