Ubele Initiative

Ubele (Swahili for ‘The way ahead’) is a new inter-generational community building initiative which focuses on the African Diaspora community in the UK. It aims to increase our community’s capacity to lead, community build and create innovative and entrepreneurial social responses to some of our most stuck social issues. After more than 60 years of significant presence here in the UK, deep social issues continue to affect our community. These range from the needs of our children, young people and families through to the emerging needs of a growing elderly population. However, as a community we do not appear to have created a coherent strategy for tackling these or other systemic social issues. Ubele believes that there is the need to be more conscious and proactive in designing, creating and putting in place essential building blocks to secure future generations here in the UK. Given the Government’s seemingly lack of focus on our current and specific needs, coupled with a policy shift towards individual and local community reliance, there appears to be an increasing urgency for the African Diaspora community to collectively engage in dialogue and to design and implement their own innovative responses. Ubele consists of an inter-generational group of experienced African heritage change agents (practitioners, managers, activists, academics, freelancers and other business people drawn from a wide range of sectors), who have come together to learn and use a variety of creative collaborative tools and processes to design and prototype new solutions to some of our community’s most stuck or ‘wicked’ social issues.