Disrupting Systems to
Advance Social Justice
Working Towards a Brighter Future Rooted and led by Inclusive Community Empowerment With Community Wealth Building, Systemic Litigation, Mental Health, Research, Recovery pathways
Our Focus
Mental Health
Working alongside the NHS to bring a transformative approach to Mental Health provisions. By focusing on providing culturally sensitive signposting services. Our work includes partners like ELFT & NHS England.
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Research Led Community Development
Our overall vision is to ensure that our organisation caters to the immediate needs of marginalised communities, to use hope as a discipline in our delivery and play a pivotal role in creating a more just, equitable, and culturally attuned society. We aspire to make positive, lasting changes in the lives of those we serve, anchored in ethical leadership values and community-centric strategies.
Research Led Community Development
Through true co-production, continuous refinement, and genuine community engagement, our vision is to advance social justice, ensuring that solutions to challenges faced by marginalised communities are both understood and embedded in broader policies and practices. Coffee Afrik’s ethos revolves around support, empowerment, and equality. We reduce inequalities by creating platforms to address intersectional issues. Community centric.
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Community Hubs - Hood Futurism
We currently co lead 7 culturally competent hubs across multiple boroughs in addition to introducing the UK's first Somali run food pantry, which is managed by our clients and in collaboration with Felix Project.
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Highly respected lived experience-led organisation producing high-impact work since 2018.
Key Achievements
- Running two Community Women’s Coops
- Pioneering the UK’s first-ever Somali digital peer-to-peer support pathway for women
- Working on transformative programs in partnership with ELFT
- Youth provision: support for young people facing violence and grooming, developing tech skills, and more
- Support for individuals dealing with problematic drug use
- Campaigning: publicising social injustice
Our Mission
We believe in empowering communities to deliver the support they need themselves, creating spaces where people can come together, connect, and feel a sense of belonging. We tackle deep-seated, difficult, and often taboo issues in our community including mental health, asylum seeker rights, problematic drugs, and homelessness. We believe that trauma affects people at both an individual but also a collective level, and that communities have the power to heal from within.
Our Programs
- Community Women’s Coops: convening, hot food coops, art and music therapy, spiritual healing, advocacy, and more.
- Transformative programs with ELFT to improve access to mental health services for marginalised communities.
- Youth provision: support for young people facing violence and grooming, developing tech skills, diversionary activities like football and boxing.
- Support for individuals dealing with problematic drug use in Tower Hamlets.
- Campaigning: publicising social injustice through national housing campaigns.
Our Approach
We empower community members to create and run local hubs, providing welcoming and culturally appropriate spaces for people to meet, try new activities, and access support. Our approach includes practical support such as food provision, rooted advocacy, housing campaign support, and substance misuse recovery provision.
Research and Advocacy
We carry out research into community issues and campaign at local and national levels to reduce inequalities and improve the lives of communities in some of the UK’s poorest boroughs, in partnership with bodies such as NHS England and the GLA.
Governance and Support
We are governed by a Service User Group, led by an Executive Team, and managed by a group of Place Based Leaders who oversee the work of the projects and healing hubs. We are supported by a network of Elders that enables us to draw on additional expertise as required.
Tech Hub
Our new tech hub at Second Home in Spitalfields is focused on innovation and further education support specifically for young Black men.
Our Ethos
Coffee Afrik is a truly community-led organisation, recognising the community’s intrinsic knowledge of their needs. Like everything else we do, this project will be led by a listening/learning/community-leading approach.
Since our inception, we have been proactively engaging with the community through listening events across each borough, allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of community needs, particularly those of marginalised communities.
- By organising twelve listening events across the boroughs, we have heard from 1299 individuals, ranging from young people to caregivers and community organisations. This ensures that every initiative is birthed out of genuine community input.
- Privileging lived experience: Our leadership is not about hierarchical power, but about lived experiences. Those who have first-hand knowledge of the challenges our community faces guide our projects, ensuring authenticity and relevance from the very inception.
- Our approach to working with diverse communities across Hackney and Tower Hamlets builds on our deep roots within communities and the relationships and our understanding of the needs, aspirations and inequalities experienced by service users and diverse communities.
- We build safe spaces to support learning and growth, to harness wellness and resilience to feel empowered, with, and through the fostering of strong peer connection and engagement.
- Our team will use their own lived experience of mental health issues to work alongside people in an equal partnership on their journey towards maintaining wellbeing, independence, and recovery into adulthood.
- We use a quality improvement framework to evaluate target groups across Hackney and Tower Hamlets which enable Coffee Afrik to identify the communities who have poorer access, experience, and outcomes.
- Carers
- From racialised communities
- Have a learning disability/Autism
- From families with a low income
- Looked after CYP
- In contact with the criminal justice system
As part of this engagement framework, we connect with community leaders and service users within the community through listening events, building relationships of mutuality and trust.
We have been funded by Civic Power Fund, to mobilise our campaigning strategy through listening assemblies on Health and Mental Health Inequalities, working with the diverse local communities in Hackney and Tower Hamlets and VCSE organisations to identify solutions to the inequalities in mental health they are concerned about.
We host events to share the priorities with key stakeholders in the borough, led by lived experience experts.
- Our model of Listening, Learning, Leading forms the basis of co-production and identifying what the communities’ priorities are. In addition, we would align their goals and aspirations with the priorities of each local borough, ELFT CAMHS and the ICB enabling service users and their carers to shape solutions with the wider system.
- Working within the community and employing staff who reflect the demographic makeup of each borough, enables us to have wider access to information, knowledge, and solutions to target at-risk groups.
- We build in the cycle of learning to iterate, where we adopt a practice of learning from our delivery, testing innovative approaches and reviewing our priorities.