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.

Our Approach

• 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

• 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.

Focus Groups

• 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