Without community,
there is no liberation

A Mental Health Campaign for Black Queer Men in the UK

Recent experience shows that change is possible when people work together for it. Big challenges demand big ambition—and offer big rewards. We're proposing what's never been attempted: mental health transformation at community scale, reaching 35,000 Black queer men, a group made vulnerable to a toxic mix of traumatic social pressures, through a 5-year, £10.5M investment in reparative justice. Not a pilot. Not a demonstration project. Comprehensive change across six sectors, backed by evidence, informed by experience, co-designed with those who'll benefit. This is what ambition looks like when communities lead. Thank you for taking the time to engage with these ideas. Read, respond, and join us in building the futures we deserve. #AllGoodThingsMustBegin

— Dr. Rob Berkeley, Director, BLKOUT

The Core Problem

The system runs on data.
The data doesn't see us.
So the system doesn't serve us.

Being made invisible in a data-driven system is likely to be fatal. The NHS, local authorities, and commissioners are incentivised to address gaps that the evidence shows them. But the evidence base for Black queer men's mental health barely exists — not because the need isn't there, but because the will to gather it never was.

The ONS nearly collapsed under the last Census, forcing new government management. This means intersections beyond gender, income, age, and ethnicity are invisible unless they have reliable independent comparator data. Disability has DWP benefits data. Religion has established institutional infrastructure. Sexual orientation among racialised communities has nothing.

No independent comparator dataset. Invisible in data. Invisible in commissioning. Invisible in services.

This isn't a communications challenge. Going viral isn't our strategy — it's a survival response to a system whose evidence base was built to ignore us. What we're building here is the dataset that doesn't exist, and the case for why it must.

Video Essay

On intersectionality, and the politics that renders us invisible to the NHS and at greater risk of poorer physical and mental health. A data void obscures our realities from the clinicians who collect, interpret, and act on data about Black queer patients — often pathologising, misrecognising, or rendering them invisible.