In December 2025, the podcast team at Hex interviewed local powerhouse Dawn Dublin at Hatton’s Yard, a community space in St Leonards currently trying to remain open despite financial and arguably political pressures.
Dawn Dublin set up Black Butterfly as an afro-centric mutual aid organisation in the 2020 lockdown. It was among many other mutual aid organisations being established locally, nationally and worldwide. Their mantra is “solidarity, not charity”. The name Black Butterfly comes from the idea that a small act can affect a huge change – like the butterfly effect.
The organisation delivered two inaugural programmes: Dark Matters and Joyful Roots.
Dark Matters provided mental health support, connecting black therapists with community members who otherwise felt that mental health services failed to adequately engage with their experiences.
While Joyful Roots was focussed on food sovereignty, securing the basics that people need to stay alive: food, water, shelter, air. Making people aware of the essential relationship that we have with the planet and the natural world.
Lockdown revealed so much about so many communities, and apart from dealing with specific challenges facing its people, Black Butterfly focussed on things everyone can benefit from. For example: regenerative agriculture, entrenching small businesses within their communities and ethical supply chains, and looking at what makes a space – whether home or work – a place of belonging, welcoming and supportive.
The organisation worked to bring underutilised land and buildings back into community use, and Hattons Yard is only one of five different buildings that Black Butterfly has worked on. It began as their distribution hub for Joyful Roots, which at the height of the pandemic was providing over 250 bags of organic produce to the local area, as well as organic seeds and compost to help people grow at home. E-cargo bikes were used to distribute to those who couldn’t come and collect produce.
But Joyful Roots first started as a pop-up in an otherwise empty shop, distributing organic and surplus produce at a fair price. It got national attention not just for having a sliding scale for prices, but allowing people to trade services for goods.
Many people were hard-hit by lockdown, suddenly finding themselves in previously unknown or long-forgotten financial troubles. Joyful Roots did not want to be a food bank, implying any shame or charity. It worked, as described, as a mutual aid organisation. People would always be able to acquire food, without feeling like they had to go for a handout.
Hattons Yard has since hosted a number of local community groups, even providing space for Hex to meet and record podcasts. Other organisations include Stitch TLC, small gardening groups, refugee social groups, home education groups, music and sound folk like Kin Choir, Ocabrazoka, Dendé Nation, and community activists like Extinction Rebellion and Hastings Rental Health.
Perhaps the most surprising challenge Black Butterfly has had to deal with has been a lack of support from (and often complete disregard by) local and higher authorities and other funding bodies, who seem to not understand or not respect mutual aid as a concept. If it doesn’t operate more or less like a standard business, they can’t get their heads round it. There also seems to remain a kind of systemic racism that means organisations run by and for minority ethnic groups get a smaller share of attention and funding than those run by and primarily for white people.