Homegrown in Tottenham Needs Your Support

We’re Homegrown in Tottenham. We bring together kids, young people, their families and everyone else in our community. Before our eviction we ran a free Saturday school, community kitchen, food hub, social space and advocacy service. Since autumn 2022, we have continued to run some of our programmes out of our local library, the back room of a pub, other community spaces, parks, and cafes.

We are fundraising to keep our family and youth programs running whilst we continue to fight for a permanent space in Tottenham Hale.

Our story so far

Our story began in Tottenham, 2015, when Rose Dakuo started the Language Fun Club, offering free language classes and activities, using food to bring young people together. She saw the lack of kid-friendly spaces in her neighbourhood and wanted to do something different.

The club opened up a space where kids could speak about their lives and discuss issues they were facing without fear of judgement. It also became a space for families to cook, eat together, talk, share knowledge and support each other.

Like Rose, most families attending the club were Black and like her, many were refugees, asylum seekers, had no recourse to public funds, or were on a very low income. Social cleansing and threats of eviction impacted everyone in the club, so it came as a blow when the club itself faced eviction too.

Haringey Council's regeneration team evicted the club twice, in 2017 and 2019. Each time we had to put energy into fighting for survival rather than planning for the future. The regeneration team claimed to be improving the community but didn't see the community we'd already built.

In 2019 Grow Tottenham offered us a space and it became a home for us. Rose continued the Language Fun Club and also set up ‘Homegrown in Tottenham’. In late 2021, both projects joined as one. We continued our Saturday school, set up a film club for teens and began running a community kitchen. We started making plans for who else we could include, what else we would develop. We started dreaming. It felt like there was so much to do.

We knew the site was due to be redeveloped but were told we’d have at least until 2023. Then, in summer 2022, we were abruptly given notice to quit by the housing association Notting Hill Genesis. We made every effort to negotiate with them, but they ignored us.

In late August, we locked ourselves into our kitchen and staged a 24-day-long occupation. We knew we would lose the space, but this was the only way to make people see us and to show the injustice we were facing. We were tired of being socially cleansed from our community. They tick their ‘community consultation’ boxes, but our community was never genuinely consulted or included in the Tottenham Hale redevelopment plans.

A year later, we are still watching more vacant flats being built around the site we occupied while so many of our families are struggling to get their most basic housing needs met. Money is pouring into this area for the buildings but not going to the majority of our existing community. The government wants to give more power to the police to criminalise or even kill Black young people, but they don’t want to invest in communities. They’re taking away our community spaces and replacing them with new flats, shops and businesses that we can’t afford.

Haringey Council promised to help us find a new space, but a year later, we’re still waiting. We’ve kept going for the past year without a permanent space, because of the kindness of people in our community. We’d like to thank Alisha, Isabel and all the amazing staff of the Beehive Pub, Katie and all the Garden House cafe staff, Courtney Brown from Father 2 Father, Cee, the late Judith Sullivan and everyone else who’s supported us.

We fought to stay together because we love each other. In the past year, we’ve made a film. We supported 60+ families. Over the summer, we ran a teen drop-in, a kids’ and parents group, community events, screenings, a homework club and much more. We’ve arranged trainings on topics ranging from community organising, housing rights, and school exclusions to mindfulness and wellbeing. We're supporting incarcerated young people through advocacy and prison visits. We’re currently running a weekly parents and carers’ group which offers peer support along with a space to socialise, organise and share food together. Our programmes are always free.

However so much of the time and energy that should go into uplifting our young people, families and the wider Tottenham community is spent trying to manage precarious circumstances. Our kids deserve better than this. We want better than this.

What we are asking for

Right now, applying for funding is challenging for us because we don’t have a fixed space. Keeping afloat after our eviction has taken up a lot of time and energy, as well as put some of us in financial hardship.

We are asking for £40,000 to cover the costs of our ongoing programmes and also develop future activities while we continue to seek a permanent home. We want to be able to support our community and develop as an organisation without worrying about how we are going to survive financially from one month to the next. Money raised will go towards free community trainings, administration costs, well-being and emergency support, education, and to continue programmes with our parents, carers and young people. Your support will help us continue our work while also caring for ourselves and one another.

Aside from these costs we are still fighting for a permanent space to call our own. We will continue to keep people updated here and on our Twitter/X .

Love and solidarity