This Saturday is International Day of Charity. This year also marks Baytree’s 35th anniversary, and it felt like the right moment to tell the fuller story of how we began.
Baytree opened in Brixton in 1991. To understand why, you have to go back ten years further, to April 1981.
Where we began
In April 1981, Brixton saw some of the most serious civil disorder Britain had witnessed in decades. What followed was Lord Scarman’s report into what had happened and why. His findings were blunt: racial disadvantage and economic deprivation had created the conditions for it. Around half of Brixton was unemployed. Black residents faced discrimination that reached into housing, employment and daily life. The report identified real and pressing problems of racial disadvantage, and warned that if they went unaddressed, the anger behind them would not simply disappear.
Ten years later, Baytree opened its doors. It was founded as part of the response to what Scarman had named: a community that had been failed, and needed the tools and the space to build something better for itself. From the beginning, the focus was women and girls. They were central to their families and communities, and yet often the ones with the least support reaching them directly.
Not much has changed
It would be comforting to say that was a different era, and that the conditions which shaped Brixton in 1981 belong safely in the past.
The data does not support that.
Nationally, people from minority ethnic backgrounds are still more than twice as likely to be unemployed as the white population, a gap of 4.4 percentage points. Here in Lambeth, 39% of children are growing up in poverty, and the borough’s unemployment rate sits above the England average.
We do not have data specific to Brixton today. But the national picture makes clear that racial disadvantage and economic disadvantage are still deeply connected, in much the same way Scarman described.
What has changed is us
What has changed over 35 years is not the scale of the need, but how we respond to it.
We started as a response to a community in crisis. Today we run ESOL classes, mentoring, employability and financial programmes, well-being programmes, and more. We have adapted constantly, to Brixton’s changing population, to new waves of arrival, to whatever the last three and a half decades have asked of us.
What has not moved, in all that time, is why we do it.
Our vision has stayed exactly as it was at the start: for all women and girls to achieve their potential and lead fulfilled lives. Our mission has stayed with it: to inspire and support women and girls to gain the skills, confidence and wisdom they need to thrive in life, work and family.
Thirty five years is long enough to prove that a mission like that is not a slogan. It is something you have to keep choosing, year after year, as the world around it keeps testing it.
As we reflect, on International Day of Charity
This Saturday marks the UN’s International Day of Charity, a day set aside to recognise the role charity plays in addressing exactly the kind of inequality Brixton has lived with since long before we existed.
It feels like the right moment to say thank you. To our volunteers, who give their time, week after week, to women and girls they are not paid to know. To our funders and partners, who back work that rarely makes headlines but changes lives all the same. To everyone who has ever given to Baytree, in whatever way they could. And to the women and girls we support, whose trust in us, and whose courage in showing up, is the reason any of this has meant anything at all.
Thirty five years ago, Brixton needed somewhere that would not look away. We are still trying to be that place.
