Always on
This project successfully funded on 27th January 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
Help Save Hattons Yard - Cultural Arts Space
Saint Leonards-on-sea, East Sussex, United Kingdom
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Aim
Our aim is to raise funds towards running costs of our cultural arts space, Hattons Yard, part of a programme of community-led regeneration.
We are Black Butterfly, an Afrocentric mutual aid organisation created amidst the chaos of the Covid-19 lockdowns.
During that time, we saw a need for space - not just physical, but nurturing, community-centred and cultural. We found it in a long-term empty, derelict warehouse in the heart of St Leonards-on-Sea: Hattons Yard.
In an area marked by socioeconomic deprivation and systemic underinvestment, we saw potential. We saw a canvas for joy, a ground for healing, and a hub for regeneration and recovery. We began our Joyful Roots project, transforming this site of neglect - first into a distribution, storage hub & garden, then into a vital community-led cultural arts space, storage hub and sanctuary garden + therapy van.
LOVE LETTER TO THE COMMUNITY
Of all the sites that we tried to regenerate in during and post-pandemic, Hattons Yard was the one designated as our love letter to the community. A space for collective happenings, reimagining, mutual aid and deep, radical care.
Now, however, this love letter is under threat of being ’returned to sender’.
We face an urgent deadline to cover the costs of running Hattons Yard, and we need your help to ensure our Joyful Roots regeneration project can continue to grow.
CULTURAL REFORESTATION
Hattons Yard was one of several attempts in 2020/21 at "cultural reforestation"- an Afrocentric practice of regeneration and value creation - bringing life back to long-term empty spaces in undervalued areas, with care, community, culture and reciprocity at the core.
Since then, it has been a home to various groups that have travelled with us on this journey of revitalisation, reimagining, placemaking and creative wellbeing. Groups such as:
KIN Hastings (community choir), Acorn 2 Oak (home Ed craft group), Dendê Community (samba-reggae drum circle), Ocabrazoka (Brazilian Togetherness), Sudanese Women’s Solidarity Circle (women’s support group).
Pop-ups like: Scribble & Dribble (parent & baby art sessions), Hastings Interfaith Organisation (Pan-African cultural group), Tots Tunes (parent & baby music & movement), Stitch TLC (crafting wellness), TUFT Arts (creative performances & storytelling) and many more groups, often from marginalised communities, which needed and offer support.
A LIVING TESTAMENT TO COMMUNITY POWER
Where there was concrete and decay, we built connection and creativity. Hattons Yard is a working model of what is possible when a community decides to thrive.
Our one-of-a-kind social experiment has created:
A community-led cultural arts & wellness regeneration space, caring for people and planet.
Immense social value, alongside economic and environmental benefits.
A social hub of needs-based and peer-supported problem-solving.
A protected space for collective imagination, where we prototype equitable systems built on solidarity, not charity.
A space with one of the most diverse footfalls in the town.
A launchpad for local enterprise testing and development.
A ‘living lab’ of prevention, resilience and emergency preparedness measures.
Hattons Yard, is a testament to the power of community when given the space to grow.
By supporting Hattons Yard, you are not just saving a space. You are championing a model of self-determined community care in the face of systemic neglect.
You are telling us that our work, our vision, and our community matter.
We thank for your support.
In solidarity, the Black Butterfly family. ❤️
CONTEXT: The Landscape That We Navigate
For 5 years, we have worked tirelessly against the odds. Amidst an ongoing hostile environment, multiple crises, increasing inequities and localised systemic exclusion, the need for safe, nurturing, and culturally-inclusive spaces is not just a desire, it is a matter of survival, especially for Black and other marginalised communities.
Hattons Yard is our direct response to this void locally. It is a care-centred sanctuary we have co-created, holding space for communities of all backgrounds to be the architects of their own futures.
But the truth is, we are a tiny mutual aid organisation going up against entrenched systems of exclusion. While our work has been lauded in conversations about community regeneration and social cohesion, this has not translated into tangible support. The systemic exclusion we challenge is reflected in our reality:
- Zero public funds or direct support from Hastings Borough Council.
- Conversations about us, but without us. No seat! No table!
- Zero partnership offers from the very institutions that claim to support community-led change and ‘whole-systems’ approaches.
This lack of recognition is not a reflection of our impact, but a symptom of the very systems we seek to reimagine. It is why your direct support is not just a donation, it is a radical act of solidarity.
It is a vote of confidence in a model that is built by and for the community, proving that we can nurture our own ecosystems of care when traditional systems fail us.
[NOTE: Our hope is to save the building, but in this economic environment, we may be too late. If that is the result, then we will use the funds to clear any debts and, where possible, support relocation costs for us and other storage users.]
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made