Leader of the Year - Winner

After a week of intense voting, we are proud to announce that the winner of our Leader of the Year award, sponsored by Sherpa Adventure Gear, is:

Fida Hussain

Fida received the highest number of votes and an amazing Facebook response. A huge congratulations to Fida and thank you to everyone who voted in the competition. It has been truly inspiring to read the comments people have written about their favourite leaders.

Here is Fida's initial nomination for Leader of the Month:

"Fida has used his mountaineering skills and mountaineering qualifications for delivering Duke of Edinburgh in the Borough of Rochdale for over 10 years with a very high success rate. Rochdale has a high percentage of people from minority ethnic backgrounds. His has engaged a lot of young South Asian people in the D of E programme. He has used these skills to work with the BMC Equity Steering Group. More recently he has worked on the particular subject of why young people from a South Asian background do not engage in walking activities after completing their D of E and why they do not pursue qualifications.

Fida has set up a workshop which will include presentations from Mountain Training England and the BMC to try and encourage young South Asian people who have the skills, to consider pursuing qualifications. Currently there are 29 people interested. This has only been achieved by Fida’s incredibly hard work and the respect that he commands in the borough of Rochdale. He is able to work with both young people and community leaders and has a very strong insight into the invisible barriers that exist in the community. If successful this will have a significant impact on developing programmes to attract more ethnic minority people in to walk leading and qualifications."

In addition to the nomination, here is a snapshot of some of the lovely comments people left at the bottom of the voting page.



Since being awarded Leader of the Year, Fida was interviewed on BBC Radio Manchester's Indus programme. He features at 1hr21mins and the clip will be available to listen to until the end of January 2015.

It is still possible to vote using the Like buttons on the Leader of the Year nominations page but any votes cast after 12pm on Tuesday 16th December 2014 won't count.