Hear from OITIJ-JO Collective, our crowdfunding alumni as they share their experience of developing the TATI: Brick Lane community café project through Crowdfund London. The Mayor of London contributed £7,500 to help OITIJ-JO Collective reach their Crowdfund London target of £13,317 in 2018.
Tell us a bit more about your crowdfunding idea and how it came about
In 2018, as many of the south Asian restaurants in the area closed, our non-profit organisation OITIJ-JO Collective saw that authentic Bangladeshi food, with traditional recipes passed down through generations, was disappearing from Brick Lane and the wider community. In response, the group developed TATI – a women-run Bangladeshi cafe and social enterprise that would promote Bangladeshi hospitality, culture and culinary artistry.
OITIJ-JO is a collective of five creatives who originally came together to produce a festival in London’s South Bank showcasing Bangladeshi art, craft, fashion literature and music in 2012. The group aims to promote Bangladeshi traditions and culture in the UK and support Bangladeshi women and youth in developing lifelong skills and confidence.
What inspired you to apply to Crowdfund London?
We struggled to secure funding to make our idea happen until co-founder Maher Anjum heard about the Crowdfund London programme. The project ended up raising a total of £13,317 from the crowdfunding campaign which was added to with the Mayor’s pledge.
Your experience of engaging local communities to gather support for your campaign. How did you go about this? Please provide key tips and ideas.
Engaging local communities was an important part of the project. We started speaking to people before applying and used their feedback in our proposal. When it came to the actual crowdfunding it was a case of reaching out to all relevant groups we could think of. In our case the key targets were people working directly with British Bangladeshi women, those working indirectly – through schools and health centres, local councillors, the Mayor, local MP and more.
We also looked for local events and used them as an opportunity to introduce our campaign; what it was for and what we needed to achieve the goal. We found it helped to be direct about what was needed: financial pledges and help promoting the campaign on their social platforms to their network. Make sure to include the deadline!
Lastly, remember friends and family alone will not achieve your target. Your campaign must have a wide base. It’s important to reach people who might not give a huge amount themselves but do have a network who may be able to. Local businesses, larger charities, local authorities are good examples. See which local, regional or national strategy your campaign’s outcomes will address and ensure that is reflected in your campaign clearly and where possible plan ahead to contact them.
What the impact of your project has been to date, how it’s evolved, where you are now
Once the crowdfunding finished and we had been successful, we had a discussion with the GLA team and re-designed the delivery milestones and actions to reflect what we had learnt through the engagement with the local community. It was a far better project for it.
Our initiative has given participants a range of new skills and a major confidence boost. The initial workshops in April 2019 attracted over 50 attendees. Today there is a core group of 12 members aged between 30 – 60, some of whom had never worked before. Many participants felt that, although Brick Lane has become known as ‘Bangla Town’, it’s a place dominated by men. Through TATI, the women are now part of a space that, historically, they have been excluded from.
The coronavirus pandemic significantly reduced our ability to organise and do things last year. We lost all our income stream in March 2020. We went back to the drawing board and looked at what we could do and how. The following activites took place in 2020:
- Cakes baked for Arts Bar & Café, Toynbee Studios – 19;
- Food cooked and served including #TATI Lunch – 9;
- Connecting Cultures Test Kitchen – 8 items tested;
- November – Rich Mix, Big Draw – catered event
- December – TATI Lunch served in collaboration with Food for Aldgate premises
In 2021, we are looking to recruit a new cohort to train as TATI Members with support from EQUIP and the European Social Fund, and we are hoping to open our TATI Craft Hub in May/June. We have also been successful in receiving awards to have two workers as part of the Kickstarter programme who will be starting in April in the Craft Hub. And we continue to look for premises to open our TATI Café.
We still have a long way to go. But it all started with the crowdfunding in 2018.