Welcome to Diverse Top 50

This is Diverse Magazine's online survey site where we will highlight excellence in diversity performance across the six main strands of diversity, namely race, gender, disability, age, religious beliefs and sexual orientation.

We will conduct various surveys that will showcase individuals, businesses and other organisations. These will include the Diverse Top 50 companies for Diversity; Diverse Top 50 educational establishments for Diversity; Diverse Top 50 Disabled Individuals and many more....

We started our survey with the Diverse Top 50 Black Merseysiders

Merseyside’s 50 most influential black men and women as voted for by the people of Merseyside

We decided to compile the Top 50 Black Merseysiders List because we want to demonstrate the fact that inspirational and charismatic black men and women have contributed greatly to the city, region, country and the world.

Many of our readers questioned why the recently produced Merseyside Power Lists have failed to include black people, when they know that many black Merseysiders have also made significant contributions. So we decided to redress that imbalance.

So, how did we do it?

Firstly we decided on the criteria for inclusion on the list. We settled on "individuals, past and present, from all walks of life, who have made a personal and universal contribution to lives they touch". They did not have to be born in Merseyside but would "have lived and worked in Merseyside and contributed to Merseyside's development".

Secondly we decided that we would not put forward any names for voters to choose from. We didn't want to influence the voters; instead we wanted the voters to be entirely free to choose the individuals that they thought were worthy of being included on the list.

We then decided that we would introduce a simple, transparent points voting system in which each voter could vote for up to 5 individuals, placing them in position 1-5. The individual placed in position 1 received 5 points, while the person placed in position 2 received 4 points and so on.

This system allowed us to simply tally up the points received by each individual.

In addition we also introduced some security measures to ensure the voting process was fair. Voters could not vote for themselves and each person was only allowed one vote. We even ensured that the online voting could not be manipulated by utilising a smart piece of equipment that checked the IP address of each email address used to vote, thus eliminating multiple voting.

We ended up with 128 names, with over 400 people participating in the voting. We then had the task of validating the list to ensure that the Top 50 met the criteria. For example we had to exclude Barack Obama, for obvious reasons and myself because, as editor and compiler of the list, we believed that I should not feature on the list.

So we finally compiled the list featuring 27 men and 23 women. That gender-based ratio is much better than in most other listing that we have seen and was even better in the Top 10 which featured 6 men and 4 women.

Further analysis of the list reveals that the majority of our influential black Merseysiders excel in the public and voluntary sector rather than in the private sector. The list also dispels the myth that influential black people are all involved in sports. Our list includes only two sports personalities, Howard Gayle and John Barnes.

14 individuals on the list were not born in Merseyside and one of those arrived on Merseyside as a refugee.

We received quite a few votes for individuals who are now deceased but only one made the Top 50 and actually ended up in 3^rd position. That person is Adiah (Sandra) Antigua who passed away in 2006.

We are extremely pleased to be able to present this list to you. We have included information on all individuals; some brief and some more detailed. There was no basis for deciding who should receive a detailed profile; this was done randomly.

At the outset we had decided that the person with the most votes would be entered in the Diverse magazine Black Hall of Fame. So indeed we have our first inductee!

This individual and all the others on the list are true role models that will inspire our young black boys and girls to raise their aspirations.

Garth Dallas