Stephanie McKenzie walks into a Nottingham public pool, and even after decades of confident swimming—even as a trained instructor—she feels it: that quiet twinge of doubt. She looks around and realizes, once again, she's likely the only Black woman there. It's a feeling that shouldn't exist in a city full of waterways, yet it does, revealing how deeply exclusion has shaped who feels welcome in the water.
This invisible barrier is exactly what Carol Burrell set out to dismantle when she founded Swim Sista Swim in Nottingham. The program tackles a historic gap: Black women in the UK have been systematically kept from accessing swimming spaces, a legacy born from segregation, cultural displacement, and compounding barriers around hair care, body image, and community trust. For many participants, the thought of getting in the water triggers not excitement but anxiety—worry about chlorine damage to plaited hair, uncertainty about time commitments, and the weight of being an outsider in a predominantly white space.
McKenzie's own journey began at seven years old in Nottingham, when her older brothers threw her into the pool on Sunday mornings while their mother managed the household. It was a baptism by water, rough but fearless. Today, working twelve-hour shifts on her feet at the NHS, she swims several times a week—sometimes two or three days in a row—as both restoration and ritual. Yet when she became an instructor for Swim Sista Swim, Burrell didn't just recruit an experienced swimmer; she saw potential and invested in it. Because the program operates on a deceptively simple principle: Black women teaching Black women in a space built explicitly for them, Burrell pushed McKenzie through the certification pipeline, clearing the path for someone already in love with water to help others find that same freedom.
Walking participants into that love matters more than it might seem. During early sessions, McKenzie observed something telling in their faces—not swimming anxiety, but something deeper. Women were calculating the cost of participation: the time to undo and redo protective hairstyles, the chemical exposure, the emotional labor of being watched. The anxiety wasn't about buoyancy or breath control; it was about belonging. By reframing the conversation away from "swimming" and toward simply "getting in the water," McKenzie and her colleagues lowered the psychological barrier enough for women to step in.
The success prompted expansion. Burrell recently launched Mandem Swim, extending the same protective cocoon to Black men, recognizing that water access is a racial justice issue that spans gender. Both programs offer something the city's public pools haven't: a community that looks like you, instructors who understand your story, and permission to claim something historically denied.
For McKenzie, even as someone who has never feared water, Swim Sista Swim gave her something her childhood Sunday mornings couldn't: sisterhood in a space that had always been hostile to Black bodies. That shift—from individual swimmer to community builder—is quietly revolutionary. It suggests that swimming isn't just a skill to be learned. It's a form of freedom worth protecting, teaching, and sharing.