Coffee Afrik at a Glance

7 hubs, building hood futurism and thriving communities.

Coffee Afrik is a highly respected lived experience-led organisation, producing high-impact work since 2018. Our youth services and problematic drug use projects have received national attention and will soon feature internationally through Guardian Online and Sky.

Our key achievements include:

● Running two Community Women’s Coops currently funded by Equally Yours, these hubs — which were set-up/informed/inspired by liberatory harm frameworks — are a space for convening, hot food coops, art and music therapy, spiritual healing, advocacy, ‘chai and chatter’ sessions, systemic litigation labs and campaign management.

● Pioneering the UK’s first-ever Somali digital peer-to-peer support pathway for women, addressing undiagnosed mental health conditions.

● Working on transformative programs in partnership with ELFT to improve access to mental health services for marginalised communities. Youth provision: support for young people facing violence and grooming, homework; developing tech skills; diversionary activities such as football and boxing. Support for individuals dealing with problematic drug use: we work with over 150 service users in Tower Hamlets, providing day and night outreach and culturally appropriate non-clinical support.

● Campaigning: publicising social injustice (i.e., our national housing campaign funded by Civic Power Fund)

● 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, substance misuse, and homelessness. We believe that trauma affects people at both an individual and also a collective level, and that communities have the power to heal from within. We work to free our communities from cycles of generational trauma built up from decades of racism at societal and institutional level.

● 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, based on a Community Wealth Building approach. Through the hubs and direct outreach into communities, we also provide practical support such as food provision, rooted advocacy, housing campaign support, and substance misuse recovery provision.

● 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. We believe that combining academic rigour with real-world knowledge of implementation and experience produces best results. 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, and to flex our capacity as needed. Our commitment to equality in community transformation informs our workforce practice to ensure we promote all opportunities to tackle inequality.

● Our new tech hub at Second Home in Spitalfields is focused on innovation and further education support specifically for young Black men.

● Our national work has been featured at the Centre for Alternative Technologies, at Retrofit Reimagined, with MAIA Group and Civic Square. We are the ‘go-to’ Somali-led organisation in the country, currently mentoring eight Black-led organisations around the country, which is unfunded work but critical for our communities. We have already been engaging in this area on several fronts.