Coffee Afrik CIC has become one of East London's most vital community organisations, and it started with a coffee pot on the Pembury Estate.
Abdirahim Hassan, the founder and managing director, describes his approach simply: "We don't work for communities. We work with them. And ultimately, we work to make ourselves unnecessary."
That spirit of devolution is at the heart of everything Coffee Afrik does. From the Hackney Sisters Hub, now fully devolved to community governance, to the peer-to-peer mental health pathways that bypass clinical gatekeeping, the organisation has built a model that puts power exactly where it belongs.
Trauma-informed from the start
The Crisis Cafe, Coffee Afrik's founding project, was never meant to be a service. It was a space. A kitchen, a garden, somewhere people could come and simply be heard. That's still the philosophy behind every programme the organisation runs today.
"Trauma-informed care isn't a methodology for us, it's a posture," Hassan explains. "It means we assume the person in front of us has experienced harm. We don't make them prove it."
NHS partnership and beyond
In 2019, Coffee Afrik was commissioned by East London NHS Foundation Trust to run its Community Connector Service, one of the first Somali-led mental health pathways in the country. Since then, the organisation has supported thousands of people across Hackney and Tower Hamlets, many of whom had never previously accessed statutory services.
The success of that partnership led to a research collaboration with the NHS Race & Health Observatory and the Violence Reduction Unit, bringing the lived experience of the community directly into policy.
What devolution actually looks like
The Cambridge Social Innovation Prize, awarded to Coffee Afrik in 2025, recognised the organisation's three-year community wealth-building programme. At its core: a commitment to transferring decision-making, resources, and power to the communities the organisation serves.
"It's not about handing over a programme," Hassan says. "It's about building the infrastructure for a community to lead itself."