In our second round (2021), we were able to make seven grants totalling £8,000 to these excellent groups:
- Atamai Tutor Centre
- Black Mothers Matter
- Hazelnut Community Farm
- Kiki Bristol
- Latent Pictures
- Reparations Bristol
- St. Paul’s Community Garden
- The Radical Resilience Project
Atamai Tutor Centre is a weekly service offering free one-to-one educational support to young people in Easton.
Running since September 2020, the centre operates at the heart of the local community and matches volunteer tutors to young people based on shared passions and interests. These tutors support young people through weekly one-hour sessions, and have constant communication over what excites them and where they need support, giving young people autonomy over their learning and building a relationship of trust and mutual respect. Tutors undergo 10 hours of training.
The centre seeks to empower young people in the context of an education system that is not fit for purpose.
Inspired by the anti-racist mobilisation in Bristol in the summer of 2020, Atamai’s founders started the centre to use education to fight against racism and other forms of structural inequality.
All volunteer tutors go through 10 hours of training, 6 with a National Education Union activist, and two further sessions on unconscious bias and anti-racism in education, and on supporting young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities to give them the tools to empower young people in their learning. The centre’s close links with the NEU to show solidarity with teachers affected by the present education system and to be able to refer vulnerable young people.
Black Mothers Matter was born out of the need to reduce maternal health inequalities between Black and other women in the UK.
Encouraged by the Black Lives Matter Movement, the group began life as 3 friends – Sonah, Aisha and Yomi – on maternity leave discussing the statistics facing black women and their babies via WhatsApp. Black Mothers Matter has a vision that black mothers will no longer be disproportionately in danger during pregnancy and after the first year of birth.
Currently in the UK, black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or up to 6 weeks postpartum than white women, and twice as likely to have a stillborn baby. Black Mothers Matter is addressing these issues by aiming to assure black birthers that their journey is valid and important, reduce barriers to black birthers seeking professional support, provide dedicated resources that are appropriate to black birthers and address the lack of cultural consideration from health professionals.
“… The Bristol Redistro funding came at such an important time for Black Mothers Matter. After nearly a year of self-funding our work we finally started to have some grant success, but only to cover project delivery costs...
It was hard to justify further personal investment in essential core costs like insurance or data security but we would not be able to deliver projects without these. The unrestricted funding from Bristol Redistro enabled us to put basic structures and procedures in place to enable us to really launch Black Mothers Matter. “
Based in Lockleaze, Hazelnut Community Farm exists to combat food inequality and the climate emergency, working with the community to grow food and manage land sustainably to build in resilience as the climate change drives unrest.
After a lot of hard work, the community garden launched in September 2020 in mid-Covid, committing to growing and giving away food to communities most in need – the community garden is committed to giving away 50% of what it grows to Lockleaze. The community garden has been granted a second plot of land in Horfield where it also plans to give away 50% of what it grows back to the community.
Hazelnut’s 20 members are all new to growing vegetables and provide a supportive environment to one another, creating a welcoming space for the community. The community garden is developing partnerships within the wider community, including North Bristol advice centre and Trinity Academy, with the further goal of allowing marginalized people to develop skills and find community through gardening.
“… The grant we received from Bristol Redistro has made a huge impact! The grant has allowed us to have an area that was choked out with brambles cleared and it is now being planted. The project is not yet finished but it is already coming to life.”
Kiki is a non-profit that organises social gatherings with and for Queer, Transgender and Intersex People of Colour (QTIPOC), championing diversity and representation within Bristol’s LGBTQ+ community.
Pre-pandemic Kiki ran film nights, club nights and creative showcases, and since then has run a series of online events to continue to provide support, space and connection for QTIPOC. Decisions are made through the fortnightly meeting of the core group of six members through open discussion where everyone is able to share their view.
Kiki was set up in response to exclusion from spaces experienced by QTIPOC, leading to social isolation, community disconnection and public invisibility.
The importance of a space where QTIPOC are not just included but celebrated is made all the morse important by the intersection of challenges and inequalities faced by QTIPOC: Queer and Trans people and people of colour people face considerable mental health challenges around anxiety, depression and substance abuse.
Kiki seeks to support QTIPOC by arranging social gatherings coordinated by QTIPOC, that prioritise QTIPOC and that provide opportunities for everyone to learn about QTIPOC lived experiences.
Latent Pictures is a film school that aims to develop, guide and train underrepresented filmmakers and actors in Bristol.
Latent Pictures is a film school that aims to develop, guide and train under-represented filmmakers and actors in Bristol. Its founder, Ryan Francis, says:
“… My attitude was ‘The industry doesn’t care about people like me, so, I’ll help others and do it myself’. I’m a working-class black guy originally from Easton/St Pauls, who rarely receives opportunity and never receives funding or support by organisations or schemes, hence with Latent Picture why I’m the only person running it and doing it all myself with no support.”
The name ‘Latent’ is a reference to all of the latent talent or hidden potential that the industry consistently rejects because it is generally afraid to let ‘different’ people in. It’s also a nod to the animated series Dragon Ball Z: the character Gohan had latent potential and the Gods trained him to master that potential, regardless of him being an earthling, in order to save the universe.
The first Latent Pictures project, Black in a Box, had a budget of £0 yet managed to elevate a working-class black actor onto an NFTS (National Film and Television School) acting course, which is unheard of.
Latent Pictures has also supported a white working-class filmmaker to make his first film, which won a runner-up award in a film festival. Latent Pictures invests time into those who would never get a chance in the industry otherwise.
“… In a few months, the grant we received from Bristol Redistro has enabled us to help people get onto productions and smaller training and consultation sessions. Already this seems to be really useful.”
Reparations Bristol is a community interest company (CIC) that provides support and education to underprivileged young people aged 11 to 16 years from an African-Caribbean background who are at risk of not achieving full education and employment.
It gives these young people access to programmes that offer tuition and mentorship to help them on their journey. It builds relationships with the African-Caribbean community to support them to be involved in the programme. It also provides stories of lived experiences so that young people can avoid the path which can lead to crime.
Racial discrimination is a key contributory factor having a negative effect on the lives of the young people that Reparations Bristol seeks to support.
Racism itself can undermine mental health characteristics, such as resilience and hope, which in turn may lead to social unrest. Addressing it is vital to ensuring the health equity of all children, adolescents, young adults and their future families. Reparations Bristol’s vision is to equip African-Caribbean children with the life skills required for a brighter future for all. It fights for unity, love, justice, equity, opportunity and all those necessary things to ensure the generations coming up can thrive.
“… Reparations Bristol have purchased two sewing machines for our Art n Crafts sessions. We will use the remainder to cover DBS checks, First Aid courses and promotional shirts. The funding has been a great help.”
St Paul’s Community Garden
£1,000
Two years ago a St Paul’s resident spoke to the local community development officer about re-opening an overgrown space in the heart of the neighbourhood that used to be an allotment. A team gathered and agreed it should be a community garden – a space where gardening is used as a community hobby, a skill-sharing environment and a good excuse to bring a very diverse community together through shared experience.
As the space had been completely neglected, the project has, so far, been largely about a community getting together to reclaim the space and transform it in to something that benefits everyone.
This has meant a lot of infrastructure building, clearing and tidying, as well as building relationships with local organisations. The team has also grown and harvested a lot of food.
Through these activities St Paul’s Community Garden inspires agency in community members relying on and learning from each other’s strengths. Its members believe gardening to be the perfect, multi-faceted community hobby, as it is relevant to people of ages, backgrounds and beliefs. St Paul’s Community Garden builds on this by making all activities accessible to as many community members as possible.
The Radical Resilience Project (RRP) is a survivor-run organisation that changes systems, creates new structures, dismantles rape culture and supports all survivors.
It is an educational platform, a mutual support space, a basic accessible fund for survivors of rape and sexual violence who don’t have money, and a movement. It exists to radically rebuild the systems that cause harm and oppression, tackle male violence, create real safety and change dangerous attitudes around recovery and healing.
Its founders are survivors who set it up in December 2019 as an answer to the problems they saw within existing survivor support spaces.
The Radical Resilience Project actively dismantles the harmful narratives we are fed by rape culture, sexism and capitalism. It does this through supporting survivors in an online and offline community, through a mutual survivors’ support collective and with a Resilience Fund, which is based entirely on trust and mutual support.
It also provides education and unlearning, including ‘disobedient survivor talks’, an emergency men’s learning course, and consultancy for existing support services. The Radical Resilience Project explores survivors’ own value and expertise without limitations or control. It is and always will be entirely run by survivors of rape and sexual violence.
“Bristol Redistro to us represents what grant funding should look like.The way money is distributed and the trust and autonomy given to groups the money is shared with is invaluable.As a grassroots community group who are not registered as a charity and want to do things differently we have limited funding options. BR has been such a support.
We are using the money to support a series of events around radical support including launching our Radical Library and running a Radical healing day this year. We want to thank BR for the respect, trust and support of our projects.” – Bryony and Meg, RRP
Bristol Redistro 