May Project Gardens is an award-winning, London-based grassroots organisation. They exist to empower marginalised groups to address poverty, disempowerment and access to resources and influence. They provide practical, affordable, and collective solutions for people to live sustainably and challenge power structures that don’t serve their interests.
This is done using universally connecting tools–nature, food and creative arts–to foster peoples’ personal transformations, which collectively lead to social transformation.
“We are a social enterprise creating art that pollinates conversation through immersive and transformative experiences.
Humblebee Creative exists at the intersection of arts, health and education: specialising in applied theatre, film, literature, research and archiving. We also provide creative services in mental health intervention and rehabilitation.
Humblebee Creative’s core values are to embrace, listen, advocate, and care for minorities within our communities. We seek to amplify and empower marginalised voices in the UK to generate new ideas for a more inclusive society.”
Sistah Space is a community based non-profit domestic abuse service located in Hackney, London.
They work with African heritage women and girls who have experienced domestic or sexual abuse and those who have lost a loved one due to domestic violence.
Their mission is to encourage African heritage survivors/victims to report abuse by providing a safe cultural venue for victims to disclose abuse in a confidential environment, and to encourage community integration.
Free Books Campaign supplies books by authors of colour to those who cannot access them, for free.
Education inequalities can define and shape someone’s entire life, from having access to important books that help us to understand our place in the world, to systemic barriers to our attainment. Sofia Akel’s campaign hopes to contribute in closing that gap.
Black Minds Matter is a collection of mental health resources and therapy for black trauma.
Agnes and Annie aim to connect black individuals and families across the UK to certified, professional, black practitioners for therapy sessions.
Black people deserve access to the best mental health resources to allow them to heal and vent in a safe space.
Community Action on Prison Expansion Campaign is a network of grassroots groups fighting prison expansion in England, Wales and Scotland.
CAPE reject the myths that prisons, surveillance and policing can solve social and economic problems. CAPE seek alternatives that keep our communities safe and achieve real social justice.
The Free Black Uni was founded by Melz Uwusu who led the national ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ campaign at Leeds University. They state “the knowledge that introduced the very ideology of racism into our society was born in British Universities.”
The Free Black Uni believes, “the core of education should be the right to imagine transformative worlds and that it must be free, anti-colonial, and accessible to all.”
Choose Love does whatever it takes to identify, close and prevent gaps in services and protections for refugees and displaced people. They elevate the voices and visibility of refugees and are the only funder of agile community organisations providing vital support to refugees along migration routes globally. In just five years, they have raised ~$45M to provide 1M refugees with everything from lifesaving search and rescue boats to food to legal advice. They are powered by their vision – a world that chooses love and justice every day, for everyone.
BID is an independent national charity established in 1999 to challenge immigration detention. We assist those held under immigration powers in removal centres and prisons to secure their release from detention and challenge their deportation through the provision of free legal advice, information and representation.
African Rainbow Family (ARF) is a non-for-profit charitable organisation that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual and queer (LGBTIQ) people of African heritage, including Refugees and the wider Black Asian Minority Ethnic groups.
BLAM UK (Black Learning Achievement and Mental UK) is an award-winning advocacy, Educational and Mental Health Not-For-Profit for the black community in the UK.
“We provide support to the community by teaching black history and racial esteem projects in primary, secondary schools and Youth Offending Teams across London. We also provide Black History training workshops for schools to help ensure schools are embedding Black Narratives across the Curriculum.
For our mental health projects we provide free racial wellness virtual therapy to persons aged 18 plus in the UK, as well as providing safe spaces for community dialogue in person and online.
We also provide free school/college exclusion advocates to black young people and their parents to assist challenges to school exclusions across London.”
Pay It Back UK is a fundraiser which prioritises black and marginalised lives first. Your donation will be split and shared evenly between a group of organisations based in the UK.
The criteria for the organisations involved is that they have a history of/focus on supporting and empowering black and marginalised communities.
Beyond financially investing in organisations, we need to stay active together taking ongoing action which will result in real structural change, so that the need for ‘charity’ is eradicated, and true liberation is achieved.
Set your donation to recurring to stay invested every month. Solidarity and mutuality, not ‘charity’.
Any contribution to Pay It Back should be seen as an investment into organisations with justice, equity, and community care at their heart.
Your role as a Pay It Back donor is to be a co-conspirator, resisting systems which aren’t working for any of us.
The main aim of Pay It Back UK is to normalise recurring donations to organisations that work with black and marginalised communities.
We are a collective from across the UK who aim to use our access, skills, and position to platform and amplify the organisations.
The goal of both the website and social media is a call to action, directing people to black-led and anti-all-systems-of-oppression platforms.
Involvement in this organisation is an invitation to interrogate and divest from systems of oppression, whilst together investing in and building alternative ways of living and thinking.
Together we can refuse these dying and destructive systems by nurturing systems that hold value for fairness, freedom, abundance, restorative justice, and joy over fear, greed, exploitation, excess, and individualism. Solidarity and mutuality, not ‘charity’.
To get in touch, please send an email to info@payitback.uk
We also run a monthly action group called Action Sundays which is a roundup of actions to take (petitions, email templates, consultation prompts, and local protest updates). If you would like to receive this monthly email, let us know by getting in touch via Instagram DM or email.