Community Organising, Co-production and Regenerative Governance
About this Event
About the session
Rather than presenting co-production as a methodology for improving existing services, this session interrogates something deeper: who holds power, who owns knowledge, who controls resources, and who gets to imagine what comes next?
Abdirahim will share lessons from Coffee Afrik on moving from participation towards shared governanc recognising lived experience as knowledge rather than testimony to be extracted, creating community-led accountability structures, and building relationships around trust, repair, healthy conflict, healing justice and collective care.
We'll also explore regenerative governance as an alternative to organisational cultures rooted in hierarchy, scarcity, urgency and control — including rest as resistance, succession planning, community ownership, and how to build institutions that don't simply reproduce the systems we're trying to transform.
Most importantly, this session invites us to question the assumption that communities need to be "empowered" by institutions. Communities already hold power, knowledge and extraordinary capacity. Perhaps our task is to dismantle the conditions that suppress that power, move resources closer to communities, and create the infrastructure through which it can flourish.
About the speaker
Abdirahim Hassan is the Founder of Coffee Afrik CIC, an infrastructure organisation building new models of community power, health justice, youth organising and regenerative governance across East London and beyond.
His work is rooted in a simple but deeply political belief: communities closest to structural injustice hold knowledge, imagination and leadership that institutions too often fail to recognise. Through Coffee Afrik, he has helped develop an ecosystem of more than 30 community programmes reaching over 14,000 people annually, spanning youth power, women's leadership, health justice, participatory grantmaking and systems change. His practice draws on decolonial thought, Black feminist traditions, restorative and healing justice, collective care and lived experience as knowledge
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
