1 minute read
SPREADING BLACK JOY
Charon Cummins and Niamh Fitzmaurice founded Hellaa Melanin three years ago to celebrate the Black community in Brent and beyond. They spoke to Jessica Alves about their inspirations, achievements, and future ambitions
“We started Hellaa Melanin on Instagram while we were at university together. That’s when we became very aware of our presence as black women in predominantly white spaces.
Studying black culture isn’t really in the curriculum, and usually when you learn about black people, you don’t get an empowering experience. We wanted to celebrate other black people and understand ourselves a little better, so we thought it would be great if we could support and empower other people.
“We focus on people’s relationships with friends, families and themselves, to explore what self-love and self-care means to them. It’s so interesting to get people to reflect on themselves in a positive way. That’s been a really great driving force for us. Then once we moved back home to Willesden, we created events to bring people together, and give them wa platform to share their experiences.”
Charon and Niamh discuss that even though everyone is welcome at their events, the aim is to prioritise and support black people: “A key point of Hellaa Melanin is to try to reclaim spaces that aren’t typically ours, so for our events we purposely choose venues that you don’t tend see black people in on a day to day basis. We fill them with diverse groups of people, music by black artists, and food from black culture, to spread black joy and share that black people can do whatever they want.
“Resistance doesn’t always need to mean that we’re angry or complaining. It’s also us saying that we’re going to enjoy our existence. We’d love to continue to create events for people from all age groups in Brent and across the world. We can learn so much from each other.”
Charon Cummins and Niamh Fitzmaurice created Hellaa Melanin to celebrate and uplift Black people
