How Black leaders in South London redefined safety and took charge of the funding narrative.

The Story

WHO ARE THEY?

The Black Systemic Safety Fund was a partnership rooted in Black community leadership across Lambeth and Southwark.

What began as a collective inquiry into the meaning of safety grew into an 18-month Black-led process that reshaped how resources flow and who gets to define the issues.Together, community leaders, facilitators and funders set out to show that systems change is possible when Black expertise leads, when cultural practice guides the work, and when those most impacted by harm become the ones shaping the decisions.

The Challenge

WHY NOW?

When we entered the Safety Project, Black communities in Lambeth and Southwark were facing disproportionate harms across daily life.

Behind those patterns were systems that defined safety too narrowly and rarely listened.

So we asked a different question:

What happens when Black communities define safety for themselves and direct the resources to act on it?

The Solution

WHAT WE DID

Working alongside The Ubele Initiative, Reos Partners, and a cohort of 17 Black community leaders, Roots & Rigour helped steward a learning process rooted in African diasporic practice, systems thinking, and relational trust-building.

Over 18 months, the partnership created a learning journey that blended:

Deep Listening & Collective Inquiry

Through workshops, residential sessions, learning journeys and reflective interviews, participants revisited the meaning of safety, moving beyond crime and policing to include belonging, agency, generational wealth, public infrastructure, psychological and spiritual wellbeing, and freedom from coercion.

Participatory Grantmaking

Participants were resourced and supported to define priorities, name root causes, and determine how £500k should be allocated across prototypes addressing: 1) Safety in the education system; 2) Equity in funding for Black-led organisations; and 3) Community assets, infrastructure and leadership.

A Black-Led Systems Change Model

The process centred cultural resonance: music, art, movement, ancestral connection, dissent, joy, and collective solidarity.
Roots & Rigour held the reflective core of the learning work – surfacing core themes, supporting mediation of information across the network, naming power imbalances, and helping partners adapt the process in real time.

Ethnographic Learning & Analysis:

Through interviews, observation and thematic analysis, Roots & Rigour brought participants’ experiences into focus, highlighting the realities of racialised harm, the labour of community leadership, and the conditions required for Black-led systems change around the issue of safety, and in relation to funding and power.

The Impact

A new definition of safety

Participants developed a holistic framework that is now informing programme design, funding conversations, and future systems-change efforts in Lambeth and Southwark.

Shifted power in grantmaking

Black leaders directly shaped priorities, surfaced systemic barriers, and allocated £500k through participatory decision-making. They also challenged participatory grantmaking as a paradigm, and proposed more radical and liberatory solutions to shifting power in funding via the Wakanda Assets prototype.

A culturally resonant model of systems change

The process demonstrated the value of Black-led facilitation, collectivist learning approaches, and methods grounded in cultural practice.

Organisational transformation

Participants took methods such as Theory U, the Yam activity, Cynefin, and systems-mapping back into their own organisations, strengthening strategy and practice.

Strong cross-sector partnership

Funders, facilitators, analysts and practitioners collaborated in new ways after years of austerity and competition for local funds, disrupting extractive norms and building trust, solidarity, and relational accountability.

Working with Roots & Rigour was invaluable. Their ability to surface the unsaid, mediate difficult moments, and honour the truths of participants strengthened the entire process. Their reflective stewardship ensured learning was held with integrity, and that Black community voices remained at the centre of every decision