On Thursday, 25th April 2024, we hosted a Police & Crime Commissioner (PCC) Election Hustings at the Coach House. At this event, our community engaged with Avon & Somerset’s representatives from political parties running for the role of PCC: Katy Grant (Green Party), Benet Allen (Liberal Democrats), Clare Moody (Labour), and Mark Shelford (Conservative). We delved into their ideologies and plans, focusing on overseeing the local police force and ensuring they prioritise matters important to our communities. Our Associate, Rob Mitchell, led the event, facilitating discussions and guiding proceedings.

[BRISTOL, MARCH 2024] BSWN has been awarded £520,000 capital funding towards the refurbishment of the Coach House. Recently at risk of closure due to the need for urgent repair works, this funding helps to further its stated goal of transforming The Coach House into a regional Centre for Black Enterprise and Culture. The funding award from the Department of Levelling Up Homes and Communities comes with £50,000 of revenue funding to provide essential capacity to deliver the refurbishment project on time.

BSWN is one of the lead partners in a newly announced £3 million collaborative initiative, over 2 years, in the regions creative and culture sector with the Mayoral Combined Authority and the Arts Council England, bringing together 150 regional creative and cultural organisations to reimagine and transform access to the arts and culture has been announced. This investment will be used to open-up the sector to more diverse talent and build a more resilient West of England creative and culture sector.

[BRISTOL, NOVEMBER 2023] – On 3rd of October 2023, Bristol City Council’s Cabinet awarded Black South West Network (BSWN) a 125-year lease on the Coach House community asset building, located in Bristol, St. Pauls. The achievement carries great cultural meaning for Black and Minoritised communities in the City of Bristol, who are aware of the tight connection between their histories and this building. Positioned in the heart of Bristol’s longest-standing Black community, the Coach House was originally funded by the Transatlantic Trade of Enslaved Afrikans and then repurposed in the 1980s with Manpower Commission funding as a local Business Development Centre.

The Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) (Asylum-seeker Accommodation) Regulations 2023 seek to temporarily exempt asylum seeker accommodation from licensing requirements, due to complaints raised by Asylum Accommodation Service Contract (AASC) providers who raised concerns about overregulation. There are 6000 HMO properties accommodating 28000 asylum seekers (Shelter, 2023b). A lack of regulation will undoubtedly attract private landlords to AASC providers and lead to a decrease in housing conditions, housing availability and fire safety standards.

Every once in a while, an experience comes along that leaves an indelible mark on our souls, shaping the way we view the world and our place within it. Such an experience happened recently when the BSWN team embarked on a transformative journey to Museum Zoma in the heart of Addis Ababa with colleagues from the Arnolfini and UWE who were kind enough to invite us to share this experience with them. In this blog post, we share some of our reflections on the impact of our visit and the profound lessons we learned about art, architecture, education, sustainability, leadership, and the celebration and preservation of heritage and tradition.

On Thursday the 5th of October, 2023, I was lucky enough to represent BSWN  at the TTEACH Plaques Launch held at The Tabernacle in Central London. TTEACH Plaques – an acronym for Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical Plaques – is a descendent-led initiative founded by Gloria Daniel with the support of the SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media. This incredible initiative aims at placing a much-needed spotlight on places and people ‘incontrovertibly tied to the transatlantic slave economy.’

These UnMuseum public events offered an opportunity for the diverse communities of Bristol and beyond to engage directly with a group of academics, activists, artists, researchers, and writers – all variously associated with BSWN. All involved with the conception, development and envisioning of just what an UnMuseum might constitute. The series of roundtable events, as public dialogues were not focused on the concrete aspects of the materiality of the UnMuseum itself as a physical space as such.

The Permanent Forum on People of African Descent aims to realise a dream that entails the full and uncompromising protection, promotion, and respect of the human rights of people of African descent, globally. This reflection will serve to draw links between the points made during the First and Second Sessions on the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent and the work done by BSWN throughout the years.

The influence of a public figure can often act as a canary in the coal mine, drawing attention to a distinct societal problem that not only plagues them, but society in general. The problem with this analogy is that the public figure afflicted with a societal ill is often the most prominent of those affected, but certainly not the first.

BSWN’s ‘Make It Work’ Programme Achieves a Staggering £377k increase in Economic Benefit for the Black & Minoritised Adult Social Care Sector in Bristol On Friday 9th June, Black South West Network (BSWN) was joined by approximately 30 key strategic stakeholders at Bristol City Hall for the official launch of the ‘Make it Work’ programme’s Learning & Evaluation Report.

BSWN is pleased to announce the launch of a 3-month pilot initiative aimed at tackling food poverty in Black and Minoritised communities. This pilot has been developed in partnership with Jikoni at the Coach House CIC. Both BSWN and Jikoni are situated at the Coach House in St. Paul’s, with existing kitchen facilities in the café for preparation of hot meals for the Food hub project pilot.

The arrival of the Bibby Stockholm at Dorset’s Portland Port marks the South West as its most recent global destination. Founded in 1976 in Barbados, the Bibby Stockholm has had a lengthy history with the accommodation of people. From housing the homeless and asylum seekers in Hamburg, Germany, to detaining asylum seekers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the Bibby Stockholm continues this trend in Dorset.

On Thursday the 6th of July we hosted an ,’Investing in Black Tech’ event at Burges Salmon located in central Bristol. This event was to showcase six of our talented Black & Minoritised tech entrepreneurs from the Transforming Business for the Tech Future Programme. They were given the opportunity to deliver a compelling 60-second pitch to a panel of investors, to compete for a cash prize of £5,000.

This Windrush75 week, BSWN is highlighting the different experiences of Caribbean post-war migrants, and celebrating the contributions they have made to Bristol and the UK. Today we share two poems written by Ros Martin, a Bristol-based writer, artist and author of “BEFORE I AM RENDERED INVISIBLE: Resistance from the Margins”.