Dipu Ahad - Newcastle City councillor

At 29, Dipu has been a councillor for just two years, and although he says that apart from a daily visit to the gym and two sessions of football a week, he "doesn't really have a life at the moment", he can't think of anything he doesn't enjoy about being a councillor.

Dipu represents the ward in which he was born and grew up and believes that it was his passion and determination to do something for his community which led to his ward party members overwhelmingly selecting him as a candidate. The area he represents is one of the most deprived in Britain and he feels that the people who made the effort to go and vote for him need his commitment to them as a full-time councillor.

Some of the achievements he can point to from his first two years as a councillor include building a positive relationship with the police that has enabled him to bring the Muslim community and police closer together to tackle terrorism issues, and working with young people at risk of offending to get them engaged in politics - even taking them on tours of the House of Commons to try and get them interested and inspired.

Although his family had always been Labour, he thought carefully before deciding he wanted to be a Labour councillor and looked into the other parties' approaches. Ultimately he felt that Labour's more rigorous approach to selecting the best candidates to become councillors would mean he could be more effective in the Labour Party than anywhere else because he would be working with other determined and committed people.

Another factor in his decision to become a councillor was the support he gained from Labour leader Cllr Nick Forbes, who encouraged and supported him to stand. As Dipu puts it:

His inspirations and role models have been the great black activists and freedom fighters, from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, because of his experience of facing racism, including physical as well as verbal abuse. He could look at what they went through and gain the strength to get through bad patches and renew his determination to fight racism and poverty in his community.