These Changemakers are grassroots champions who fight injustices and improve the lives and opportunities of those around them.
Replenish Culture CIC
Replenish Culture CIC is dedicated to empowering black and mixed-heritage children in care, co-founded by Sarah Livingstone and James Kargbo. Based in Camden, it provides carers with tools to nurture foster children irrespective of ethnicity. Their ‘Replenish’ boxes offer haircare and skincare products that cater to the unique needs of children with afro hair. Kargbo told us more.
What is your big issue and how are you trying to tackle it?
Sadly, black children in foster care are disproportionately represented, entering the system at higher rates than their white peers. In fact, 17% of children in care in England are black or mixed ethnicity. Currently there is a significant shortage of black foster parents to match this need. This lack of representation can lead to black children being placed with families who may not fully understand their cultural background, which without the right support, can cause issues like identity confusion, or feelings of isolation. At Replenish Culture we are tackling this issue by providing a curated box which contains a wide array of products that cater specifically to the unique hair and skin needs for children with afro hair from black or mixed heritage backgrounds. By giving these children/carers the tools and knowledge to care for their hair and skin, we aim to empower them to embrace their cultural identity and appreciate their natural beauty. We firmly believe that when children feel connected to, and proud of their heritage, it positively impacts their overall wellbeing and development.
What’s the one thing you want people to know about your work?
We want people to know that our work is fun. Our central aim is about encouraging people to celebrate black and mixed heritage identity. The media discourse can be quite negative and so it’s even more important that parent’s/ caregiver and professionals working with children try their best to counteract this.
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What are your 2024 highlights?
2024 has indeed been a year filled with highlights. However, the standout moment was being selected as Charity Partner of the Year at the 2024 Tress Gala – an event aimed at celebrating the UK’s thriving Black hair styling industry. We had the opportunity to connect with some of the most amazing hair stylists and we left feeling empowered and inspired to continue with the amazing work we do.
A notable mention was facilitating our second Packing day event with Fragomen LLP – A global immigration law firm. Colleagues had the opportunity to build some Replenish Culture boxes which can now be donated to children and families who will benefit.
What are your plans for 2025?
The new year brings new opportunities. For the year ahead, we would like to continue working with foster carers and social workers. However, we have plans to begin engaging with schools and delivering workshops to students. Hair discrimination remains a big issue in schools. Research by the Halo Collective highlighted that one in four black adults and 51% of 11-18-year-olds have been sent home because of their hair. Hair discrimination has to stop. We want to deliver more training and collaborate with even more changemakers to ensure that big issues continue to be tackled.
Replenish Culture’s founders James Kargbo (back right) and Sarah Livingstone (front right)
Belinda Schwehr, CASCAIDr CIC
Belinda Schwehr founded CASCAIDr CIC to ensure that the state fulfils its legal duty of care to our most vulnerable. In England and Wales, hundreds of thousands of eligible people go without the vital care they need. Many do not feel able to even ask for help, and more than 50% of people who do are denied. Belinda saw a way to close this gap: legal literacy. CASCAIDr provides free, accessible and up-to-date resources, including podcasts and myth-busting pamphlets, to empower vulnerable people to understand and enforce their legal rights to social support. Schwehr is the beating heart of this organisation. Testament to her impact is her nominator, who got access to the services she needed thanks to Schwehr’s unique legal “magic careydust”.
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Emma Pears, Skipton Extended Learning For All (SELFA)
Emma Pears, a campaigner for children and young people’s mental health, set up SELFA to provide vulnerable children with a space to develop relationships and resilience. It now supports more than 400 children across North Yorkshire. SELFA works with schools, child and adolescent mental health services and NHS providers to create a space for every child and young person living with difficulties. Emma and her team deliver wellbeing support, from holiday workshops to one-on-one sessions, and meals from the community fridge. Emma’s nominator describes her as “a champion for the issues facing rural communities…advocating for small charities, sharing best practices and helping to amplify the voices of organisations like hers.”
Kinship care is the term used for when a child is cared for by a relative or close friend in place of their parents, and presents a complex range of issues within social care and fostering. Families in Harmony (FIH) is at the forefront of the campaign for racial justice for children in the children’s social care system. FIH provides the “essential and culturally empathetic scaffolding” to children unable to live with their birth parents, and is the product of decades of tireless work by founders Sharon McPherson and Johanna Bernard. Both have experience as kinship carers and advocate for specific support that black families may need.
Shea Coffey
Shea Coffey is a trans woman who set out to provide free copies of a book called The Trans Teen Survival Guide to schools and libraries in Kent. Following the murder of Brianna Ghey in 2023, she opened this offer up to all schools and libraries in the UK. In the last 20 months, she has handed out more than 2,500 books, expanded to five titles not only to schools and libraries but sports clubs, drama schools, music groups, even health care professionals and foster carers. Her nominator wrote: “Shea is trying to show the positive side of not only the LGBTQ+ community but what can be done when you reach across divides.”
Find the rest of the Changemakers series on the links below and pick up the magazine from your local Big Issue vendor.
In the words of her nominator, Tracey Herrington is a Teeside “powerhouse, bringing the real stories (the truth) to power and making sure people listen.” Described as a “pivotal leader” Herrington works at Thrive Teeside, an award-winning organisation advocating for the voice of lived experience to be included in decision-making, and facilitates spaces like Poverty2Solutions and the APLE Collective. All of these organisations aim to ensure that the voices of people who are most impacted by poverty, inequality and discrimination are heard by those who are in positions of power to make the change needed.
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Adam Khan
Adam Khan
Former Big Issue vendor Adam Khan was sleeping rough when they started selling Big Issue. Now they are an award-winning activist. Khan studied while living in hostels and secured a place to study history and politics at Coventry University, even spending a year abroad in Luxembourg. That laid the groundwork for a career in activism, which has seen Khan set up community groups, charities and organisations to create safe spaces for marginalised communities.
Tracey Walsh
Nominated by Sophie Willan, actor, writer and comedian
Tracey Walsh has raised more than £250,000 for LGBTQ+ charities. An icon of Manchester’s Gay Village, Walsh is the landlady of New York New York club. Her commitment to the LGBTQ+ community began in earnest during the Aids crisis in 1989, when she lost a friend and colleague to the epidemic. Walsh has already been nominated for the Pride of Britain Award and received the British Empire Medal courtesy of the Queen in 2019 in recognition of her fundraising.
Image: Phyllis Christopher
Huffty McHugh
Huffty McHugh has been at the heart of Newcastle’s West End Women and Girls Centre for 40 years as a member, youth worker and now leader. It is the only open-access community-based enterprise supporting women facing abuse in the area. The nominator described McHugh as the matriarch of a “welcoming, inclusive and bold family of women and girls”. McHugh and the team run gardening, cookery, cycling and farming. In 2024, the centre supported more than 10,000 vulnerable people.
E-J Scott, Museum of Transology
“No other organisation or person” is doing the “amazing things” that E-J does, writes their nominators. Matt and Jess Turtle, directors of the Museum of Homelessness, nominated Scott for the decade of work creating the Museum of Transology. Starting with community outreach and projects in Brighton, Scott’s museum is now the most significant and largest collection of objects relating to the trans and non-binary community in the UK. Everything in the collection has a personal note from its donor. Scott works to end stigma and the historic erasure of “trancestry”. In 2025, the Museum of Transology, with Trans Pride UK, is collecting donations from trans pride groups across the country for a collaborative exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum.
