Baobab is a Black-led resources mobiliser and community organiser driven by over 1,000 Black and Global Majority members living in the UK. Our values are rooted in collective leadership, our commitment to centring disability justice and our dedication to empowering organisations and individuals dismantling racial injustice. 

Like the tree we’re named after, Baobab exists to resource, root and ground Black and Global Majority communities while we fight to dismantle systemic racism. Our principles are Unity, Justice and Freedom and we strive to redistribute wealth to our oppressed communities, who work so hard to bring us further to these principles becoming our shared realities.

We carry out our resourcing and community organising work in order to facilitate equitable landscapes in which Unity, Justice and Freedom can be planted deeply enough to grow the life-affirming futures our communities need. 

Our journey is marked by our dedication to decolonial working practices and striving to embed Disability Justice more deeply throughout every aspect of our work.

Baobab was born from a gathering of people from Black and other Global Majority communities who formed Baobab’s first Steering Group (this included David Weaver, Julie Hutchinson, Marai Larasi, Derek Bardowell, Jeremy Crook, Nusrat Faizullah, Sado Jirde, Viv Ahmun, Jenny Oppenheimer, Dilhani Wijeyesekera, Joe Ferns and Jermain Jackman). The gathering was formed in response to the Black resilience movements in the UK, particularly in the wave of uprisings against police brutality in 2020. 

The group drew upon intersectional and Black feminist approaches for the formation of Baobab and over 30 initial members from local organisations and communities signed up across the UK.

Today we continue to mobilise resources from trusts, foundations, and businesses to radically subvert histories of underfunding, marginalisation, and anti-Blackness affecting UK Black and Global Majority communities. Our journey is marked by collective celebrations of our power, creativity and joy. Our learning is built on the foundation of Black Feminist  teachings from fellow funding organisations such as Project Tallawah and our  commitment to centering disability justice; ensuring no one is left behind on our collective journey to Unity, Justice and Freedom.

2020 was a traumatic awakening of white consciousness. Peaks of global attention around our long-standing lived experiences of systemic anti-Blackness, including police brutality and disproportionate healthcare inequality were suddenly unignorable in society in the middle of a global standstill enforced by the pandemic. The longstanding neglect of Black-led organisations at the hands of deep-rooted racist infrastructures were finally confronted, with the shifting of financial resources from institutions grown from legacies of slavery and white supremacy. Baobab emerged as a result of this financial shifting — we were formed by a group of Black and Global Majority activists who were determined to capture this shifting and shape it into a seed for a long-term life-sustaining infrastructure. Baobab is the dream of a Black-led ecosystem powerful enough to bring about material change for the benefit of Black and Global Majority communities.