Since her own swimming career ended, Ajulu-Bushell doesn’t believe things have changed much. “There aren’t enough channels and mechanisms for people to say ‘This is happening to me’ without the fear of repercussions. You will lose your scholarship, your funding, and it’s gonna get hushed up.” Being able to tell her own story is liberating. “I’ve always been someone who likes to control the whole piece myself,” she says. “That’s what swimming is: it’s just you and it’s this clock that’s just running down and down and down. Writing is really beautiful in that respect, because it is you and this page and the pursuit of this perfect sentence.”
As a swimmer, Ajulu-Bushell’s day would start at 4:45 a.m. for training—swimming, cycling, sprinting, drills, and weights—with only Sunday to rest. Her weeks now are just as packed, but with board meetings, recruitments, keynote speeches, “stakeholder management and mapping and then—sorry, that’s me…” She quickly types into her beeping phone before continuing. “And then a full day of audit starters, back-to-back calls…” In three years, 10,000 Interns Foundation has created 5,000 living-wage internships for Black or disabled students at more than 700 UK companies.
Her Time feature took her to a starry New York event, and a few days before we meet she attended a dinner arranged by Skepta. “It’s amazing to be in those rooms,” she says, “but I always feel like I’m pulling down my skirt or I haven’t got my nails done.” This pub is one of the rare spots where she allows herself some downtime; the place she would come with her roommates when she needed to escape writing. “The book sold the same week I got this job offer,” she says, eyes wide. For the first six months, under pressure as a first-time CEO in a new industry, she was also filing 20,000 words.
But it’s been worth it. This year, at Downing Street, she met a young woman acting as an advisor on the Government Arts Collection committee who was challenging No 10 to bring more artists of color into their collection. “I went up to her afterwards and said, ‘My God, you’re amazing. I would love to hear more about your story.’” It transpired she had been an intern through their program two years ago. “Those are very beautiful moments I feel very privileged to be able to receive,” she says. “That’s when I feel the most successful.”