There’s a moment every candidate remembers. Not the selection meeting, not the count on election night but the moment before when someone else believed in you, when someone asked you to stand. For most of us, we’d never have got there on our own. Someone else saw it first.

That’s the thread I kept coming back to recently, when the Joint Candidates Sub Committee brought together our Diversity Affiliated Organisations and Campaign Groups to talk about candidates. We heard a lot of honest, thoughtful feedback about our approvals and selection process – what’s working well, and where we must keep improving.

For me, this isn’t an abstract policy discussion on how we get more diverse candidates approved, selected and elected. It’s personal.

The new Candidates team have done a fantastic job of improving candidate onboarding and setting up a referral programme, we well as working on candidate support. Now, we need you.

Standing for Parliament didn’t feel like something for people like me. I only made it through because people in organisations like Chinese East and South East Asian (CESEA), the Campaign for Gender Balance and the Stellar Programme backed me with time, with mentoring, and with the money I didn’t have. Take any one of those away and I’m not writing this as an MP. I went from delivering leaflets to becoming the 656th woman ever elected to this Parliament, and our party’s first MP of East and South East Asian origin. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people and programmes chose to invest in me.

My story is the proof of what’s possible when we get this right. So the question I keep asking is: how do we make that true for far more people, not just the lucky few? Our party wants a Parliament that looks like the country. We’re not starting from zero: real work is already happening to make our process fit people’s real lives, not the other way round: how fast approvals move, how early financial support reaches people, and how much flexibility we build into training and support. I want to keep pushing that hard as your Vice President. We don’t have a moment to lose.

Part of getting this right means recognising what’s already working. I want to fully celebrate the work our Affiliated Organisations and Campaign Groups do to support candidates like me. But we can’t rely on their brilliance alone to do the job we need to go further, together.

And going further starts with something simple. No process, however well designed, does the one thing that has changed so many lives: it doesn’t ask.

That’s what our referral scheme is for, and thanks to the Candidates Office, we now have one. It isn’t about referring the people who already see themselves reflected in Parliament; it’s about the colleague, the friend, the community organiser who doesn’t picture themselves there yet.

This scheme is no small feat. They’ve done an incredible job ensuring we have a clear point of contact and personal follow-up for people willing to put themselves forward.

So here’s the ask, plainly: think of one person right now. Someone you’ve thought “they’d be great at this” and never said out loud. Share their contact details, and the team in the Candidates Office will follow up, walk them through what’s ahead, and, most importantly, make sure they know that someone has seen something special in them.

You can complete the form here:

I know what it meant to have people believe in me before I believed in myself. Let’s be that for someone else.

* Victoria Collins is MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted and a candidate for Vice President