Our ecosystem
“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
– Gwendolyn Brooks
Builder
I develop, organise, and implement ideas, practices, people, and resources in service of a collective vision
Caregiver
I nurture and nourish the people around us by creating and sustaining a community of care, joy, and connection.
Disruptor
I take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, raise awareness, and build power.
Experimenter
I innovate, pioneer, and invent. I take risks and course-correct when necessary.
Frontline responder
I address community crises by marshaling and organising resources, networks, and messages.
Healer
I recognise and tend to the generational and current traumas caused by oppressive systems, institutions, policies, and practices.
Storyteller
I craft and share our community stories, cultures, experiences, histories, and possibilities through art, music, media, and movement.
Weaver
I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organisations, ideas, and movements.
Abdirahim Hassan
Abdirahim is the founder of Coffee Afrik CIC, overseeing seven hubs, 17 projects rooted in mental health recovery, culturally, sensitive, problematic drug use projects, a research and litigation lab, two women’s co-ops and a thriving youth hub the busiest in Tower Hamlets.
Abdirahim has spent 20 years organising communities campaigning about housing injustice, and believes in systemic change and good trouble.
Issues: Food, Housing and Mutual Aid
Organisation: Coffee Afrik CIC.
Amy Hall (she/her)
Amy is a social justice journalist and organiser.
She is a co-editor at New Internationalist, her work covers a range of topics from climate justice to neocolonialism with a focus on the Global South.
Amy is also also a member of Bunker Housing Co-op, working to build low-impact co-operative social housing in Brighton and Hove.
Issues: Food, Housing, Land, Mutual Aid organising, Wealth redistribution
Organisation: New Internationalist and Bunker Housing Co-op
Asma Kabadeh (she/her)
Asma is a Creative Producer with an extensive background in collaborative arts initiatives.
Working across arts and heritage, community development, and documentary film, her work is primarily focused on supporting and developing creative voices.
She is passionate about increasing access in the arts, art as a tool for self expression, connectivity and increased wellbeing.
Issues: Arts and Culture
Organisation: BAXSAN Collective
Azekel Axelle (they/them)
Azekel is a Founding Director of the Black Trans Foundation, a grassroots organisation that provides free therapy to Black trans and Black non-binary people.
They are passionate about weaving canopies of support for healing, nurture and recovery. They understand and amplify the importance of spaces of care that are facilitated by those with shared lived experience!
Issues: Health and Healing
Organisation: Black Trans Foundation
Claude Hendrickson (he/him)
Claude has been active in the self build/community-led housing sector for over 30 years, advocating for more opportunities for projects in urban settings in the North of the UK.
In 1989, he founded the Frontline Community Self-Build to support an unemployed group of African and Carribbean men. He is also a founding member of the Community Self Build Agency (CSBA), supporting a number of projects across the UK many of them ex-veteran self builds.
He became the Northern Director of CBSA (voluntary in 2010) and in 2015 was commissioned by Leeds City Council to write a self-build 10 year strategy document.
Claude is an EDI associate to People Powered Homes Leeds. He is also an accredited Community Led Housing advisor (CIH) and a Community Land trust Ambassador.
He's spoken and run workshops at housing events nationally and has a deep knowledge of underrepresentation of minority groups in housing. He recently received an MBE for services to the community self build/community-led housing sector.
Issues: Housing, Land, Health and Healing, Wealth redistribution
Cherokee (they/them)
Cherokee heads up Decolonising Economics' comms and marketing.
They're passionate about documenting our histories as people of colour.
Issues: Arts and Culture
Dacia
Dacia is community organiser working towards creating more spaces that foster nurturing communities. They do this at Wharf Radical Lending Library, a collective focused on engaging people with political resistance in a community-oriented way.
Wharf Radical Lending Library offer a free collection of radical books primarily made up of Black and Brown, migrant, and LGBTQI+ writers, alongside events and workshops centring on anti-colonial education.
Aside from this, Dacia produces performance, art and healing events for QTIBIPOC folks aiming to cultivate spaces for safety, joy rest and connection.
Issues: Education, Arts and Culture
Organisation: Wharf Radical Lending Library
Dee (she/her)
Dee is a creator, organiser, and founder of the Black Feminist Bookshop, a space for resistance, imagination, and care.
Inspired by Black feminist writers, they organise pop-ups, events and book clubs, and collaborates with Black women and queer authors, activists, artists and healers who are working towards Black liberation.
Dee provides communities with a platform to engage with literature for radical social change.
Issues: Arts and Culture
Organisation: The Black Feminist Bookshop
Dre Ferdinand (she/her)
Dre is a licensed social worker, artist and therapist, whose practices include movement, energy, sound, soil, and EMDR, modalities that have informed her ‘MESSE’ approach.
Her practice framework is rooted in healing, social and restorative justice.
Dre's focus involves aiding individuals and communities in processing and recovering from systemic harm and trauma as well as advocating for therapeutic support for social workers.
Her teachings are centred on helping people navigate their internal landscape, collective care, and processing trauma.
Find out more about Dre on her Instagram.
Issues: Health and Healing
Evie Muir (she/they)
Evie is a nature writer and founder of Peaks of Colour – a Peak District-based nature for healing, grassroots community group, by and for people of colour – whose work sits on the intersections of gendered, racial and land justice.
As a Northern writer based in Sheffield, Evie is interested in writing as a form of healing and resistance.
Her debut book, 'Radical Rest', explores Black Feminist, Abolitionist and nature-allied approaches to activist burn out and will be published by Elliot & Thompson in July 2024.
Issues: Land, Arts and Culture, Health and Healing
Organisation: Peaks of Colour
Guppi Bola (she/her)
Guppi is one half of Decolonising Economics!
A trainer, organiser, researcher and strategist - she is committed to the movement of wealth, resources and power to facilitate the collective healing of marginalised communities of colour, and that this is possible if we invest in solidarity economic practices.
She also explores these themes in my practise as a potter and pickler.
Find out more about Guppi on her website.
Issues: Land, Arts and Culture, Wealth redistribution, Health and Healing
Organisation: Decolonising Economics
Hassan Sabre
Hassan is a community development organiser based in Oxford committed to supporting the empowerment and well being of multiracial working class communities in and around the city.
Hassan's history of community organising began in grassroots football, which Hassan continues to enjoy weekly with over 20 different nations playing in one team.
Hassan is motivated by creating opportunities for employment, collective resourcing and supporting our community to get active.
Issues: Food, Housing, Arts and Culture, Mutual Aid organising, Crisis response, Health and Healing, Education
Organisation: Oxford Community Action
Jacob v Joyce (they/them)
Jacob is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice amplifies historical and nourishes new queer and anti-colonial narratives.
Their work is continually grounded by collaborations and conversations with activists, community groups and archives.
Find out more about Jacob's work on their website.
Issues: Arts and Culture
Organisation: The Museum of the Homeless
Javie Huxley (she/her)
Javie is British Chilean illustrator based in London. Alongside illustration, she is a designer for Migrants in Culture and the co-chair for Save Latin Village (currently on hiatus).
Javie finds a lot of joy in blending both art and community organising, designing ways to uplift the imaginations and voices of diasporic communities in the UK.
See more of Javie's art and organising on her Instagram and website.
Issues: Arts and Culture, Health and Healing, Education
Organisations: Migrants in Culture, Save Latin Village, Resistance is our mother tongue
Jumoke Abdullahi (she/her)
A Nigerian-British force of nature, Jumoke has a great passion for social justice, not least because her life as a disabled Black woman quite literally depends on it.
One half of The Triple Cripples, Jumoke writes and speaks on her experiences and is extremely passionate about eradicating the cultural taboos surrounding illness and disability within the Black community, in the UK, and the global diaspora.
She is currently doing her Masters degree on these topics. When not busy studying, Jumoke is a professional baby girl, a Yorubaddie, if you will.
Watch The Triple Cripples TEDx Talk.
Issues: Arts and Culture, Health and Healing, Education
June Bellebono (any pronouns)
June is a writer, facilitator and producer - but also an enjoyment aficionado, undiscovered supermodel and always the last person dancing on the dancefloor.
A large part of their work is centred on the intersection between grief and queerness and is passionate about curating politically-charged spaces where the light and heavy can coexist.
Their practice is primarily centred on facilitating bereavement peer support groups and on uncovering grief through the written word.
Issues: Health and Healing
Kavian Kulasabanathan (he/him)
Kavian is an Eela-Tamil NHS doctor focused on state violence as a determinant of poor health, understanding (health)care as something we are all in practice of everyday.
He is committed to an abolitionist approach to public health in all its forms globally, including materially realising this through supporting both the establishment and flourishing of community-owned, plurally-knowledged, politicised healing spaces.
Issues: Health and Healing
Organisation: People's Health Tribunal Collective, Health Workers for a Free Palestine (HW4FP), Centric Lab, People's Health Movement
Kym Oliver (they/Kym)
Kym is a thinker, public speaker, published writer, guest lecturer, creative, PhD researcher, advocate and consultant, with an international and diverse list of credits including Google, UNFPA, University of Oxford, NASA and BBC.
Kym is a Co-Founder of both Our Living Archives and The Triple Cripples. They're also a board member for the Black Feminist Fund, ICS and the JRCT Movement Assembly.
Issues: Arts and Culture, Wealth Redistribution, Health and Healing
Last Mafuba (she/her)
Last advocates for social justice and has a profound commitment to promoting equity and empowering marginalised communities.
She conducts groundbreaking research on the accessibility and utilisation of mental health services among migrants, shedding light on the intersections of migrant integration, mental health, and social justice.
She also uses the findings to develop and deliver psychosocial interventions that adequately meet the needs of this group.
Issues: Health and Healing
Organisation: Inini Initiative
Mumbi Nkonde (she/they)
Mumbi self idenitifies as a weaver and builder in our struggle for collective liberation.
As a community activist guided by Black feminist principles, she aims to connect movement work and practise meaningful solidarity, most recently in anti-racism organising, climate justice and queer feminist communities.
In their paid work, they are one of the co-founders of the Grassroots Movements Fund, rooted in a redistributive and reparative justice lens.
Issues: Food, Land, Mutual Aid, Health and Healing Wealth Redistribution
Organisations: QTIBPOC Cinema Club, Black Lives Matter UK, Grassroots Movements Fund
Nigel Carter (he/him)
Nigel a community development worker and researcher, committed to building capacity for and resourcing community power within the global majority of Oxford and its surroundings. He does this primarily through OCA and other local organising initiatives.
He is inspired and led by Black radical organising practices and strategies.
Issues: Food, Land, Mutual Aid, Health and Healing Wealth Redistribution
Organisation: Oxford Community Action
Nish Doshi (they/them)
Nish is community builder, researcher, facilitator and strategist who focuses on building cultures of care.
They have over 15 years of experience in grassroots organising and campaigning in the UK, in areas as diverse as food justice, digital rights, and environmental justice.
Currently their work is focussed around decolonising knowledge processes, tech justice, and disability justice.
Issues: Tech
Nonhlanhla Makuyana (they/them)
Nonhlanhla Makuyana is a Community Economist and one half of Decolonising Economics.
Their work seeks to facilitate sensuous understandings of the economy that nourish life by focusing on African diaspora economic thought and practice.
Through research, archiving, facilitation and writing, their work builds a bridge between historic and contemporary movements for economic self determination.
Issues: Mutual Aid, Education
Organisation: Decolonising Economics
Raks Abdulahi (they/them)
Raks Abdulahi is a DJ, sound artist and community organiser. Their community work primarily involves co-facilitating a queer Somali organisation and collective in the UK.
Additionally, their work aims to centre queer, Black people and their experiences and connect these experiences and narratives, whether is be sonically through their music or in community organisation through workshops and resourcing.
Issues: Education, Arts and Culture
Organisation: BAXSAN Collective
Samia Dumbuya (she/they)
Samia is a climate justice advocate focusing on community empowerment and engagement with young people and marginalised communities.
They are currently studying at UCL, MSc Sustainable Resources: Economics, Policy and Transitions observing pathways and tools to decolonise extractive systems.
Samia focuses on the power of the people and using collective power to build alternative systems. Follow her on Instagram.
Issues: Climate and Environmental Protection
Sim Wadiwala (she/her)
Sim is usually in her housing coop in Brighton, living her cottagecore and anticapitalist vibe.
She is a part of the finance group for a national mutual aid network of coops, supporting coops to raise money and do spreadsheet modelling for re/financing land and housing.
In 2023 Sim became the first paid Associate Trustee for Friends Provident Foundation, attending board and committee meetings, and participating in governance, grant and investment decisions.
Issues: Housing
Organisation: Radical Routes; Friends Provident Foundation
Simmone Ahiaku (she/her)
Simmone is a campaigner, facilitator, writer and organiser who has contributed to environmental, educational and housing work in Bristol, London and across the UK.
Simmone has worked on air pollution, divestment and climate justice campaigns. She uses facilitated workshops to talk about climate change, health and colonialism at Wood & Water. Simmone is currently an organiser at the London Renters Union.
Issues: Housing
Organisation: London Renters Union
Sophie Yates Lu (she/they)
Sophie is a massage therapist who is committed to making bodywork accessible as a healing tool for survivors of violence and trauma.
She also works with survivors of violence and other marginalised groups who want to tell their stories and organise together.
Issues: Arts and culture
Tanita JL
Tanita is an Afrikan Reparationist focusing on the decolonisation of education and of the economy through grassroots organising, research, and educational facilitation, in service of Afrikan and Global South communities in anti-imperialist resistance.
Issues: Education
Theodora Ndlovu (she/her)
Theodora is a photographer and visual artist who uses art to tell stories around identity, spirituality and sexuality.
Check out her work on her website.
Issues: Arts and Culture
Victoria Williams (she/her)
Victoria is one of the Co-Founder and Directors of People Dem Collective (PDC), a community organisation in Margate, founded by members of the Black, Brown and Diaspora communities. The collective was born out of a lived experience of lack of space, engagement and inclusion for these communities and a desire to encourage healing and transformation.
Through PDC, Victoria leads efforts to amplify underrepresented voices, cultivate inclusive spaces, and foster collaboration, while also steering the ship in establishing a national cultural centre in Margate
Issues: Food, Land, Wealth Redistribution
Organisation: People Dem Collective
Zahra Dalilah (she/they)
Zahra Dalilah is a queer Black feminist from Lewisham. In 2015, her journey in social justice began through anti-gentrification, political education and radical democracy work.
They've since worked on community initiatives supporting people in deepening connection with nature for climate justice and mental health, nurturing relationships within families and in Black communities, young people yearning to take political action and redistributing resources in line with solidarity economics practice.
The focal point of much of her work is the intersection between Black liberation, food and land.
Issues: Food, Land, Wealth Distribution