Café Art Partners

Every year we partner with charities that run art groups with people who are homeless or have recently been homeless.

The homeless charities including
240 Project,
Crisis,
Providence Row,
One Support,
SHP,
St Mungo’s,
The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields,
The Pavement Magazine

Have you heard the expression “It takes a village to raise a child”?

Café Art wouldn't be where it is today without the help and support of so many of people and organisations over the years.

Homeless Link, the umbrella organisation for UK homelessness-sector organisations, endorses us. In 2019 Homeless Link provided one of our staff - director Paul Ryan - a desk to work from as part of their programme to support many social enterprises.

The Royal Photographic Society provides volunteers and contacts in other countries, including Ronaldo Aguiar, an RPS member in São Paulo, who helped with all aspects of the MinhaSão Paulo calendar project there in November 2015. In London the local group members are key volunteers on the camera handout day in July. London RPS member Julian Rouse has been running the weekly photography mentoring group online since early 2020.

Fujifilm UK has been a massive support. Every year they donate 100 disposable QuickSnap cameras to our project. they also help with the printing of signage for our MyLondon exhibitions. Fujifilm helped towards the cost of printing the calendars and greetings cards by Emmerson Press in 2020. In 2015 and 2024 they donated cameras to our weekly photography mentoring group.

Jessops develop the film, and print the photographs from the cameras we get back. They also give us generous discounts on the printing of enlargements for online orders.

Emmerson Press give us a generous discount when printing the calendars and greetings cards.

CarterWong designed the calendar. CarterWong also designed our Café Art logo and the MyLondon and MyWorld logos! Other famous logos they have created include the F1 logo and Walls ice-cream!

Spitalfields E1 Market gives us market space for the public vote in August, the calendar launch week in October and let us have space for a table to sell the calendar from October to February.

St Paul’s Cathedral provided the Wren Suite in the Crypt. This allowed us to hand out the 100 cameras every year and receive them back 7 days later. Later we were allowed to use the Crypt to sit down with the photographers to choose the exhibition (every photographer can choose three photos each for the exhibition).

Our RPS photographic mentoring was the awarded the Santander Discovery award worth £5,000 in 2018.

The National Lottery Community Fund helped us in 2020 to run an art mentoring programme run by Cafe Art artist and photographer Geraldine Crimmins. The mentoring also included helping the artist keep connected with regular phone top-ups and an exhibition online.

The Cafe Art 'Art in Cafes project' received it first lot of funding in Cafe Art's history from the East End Foundation to help with the cost of framing artworks!

To assist with the cost of hosting the public vote of the 2019 MyLondon top 20 images, Tower Hamlets Council have donated £1,250 toward our event!

Cafe Art are happy to announce that we were awarded a grant to help pay for the salary of our Development Manager, to help further Cafe Arts impact and development within London and internationally.

Oath / Verizon helped our member Geraldine Crimmins establish her art mentoring programme in 2018-2020.

Special thanks

THANK YOU to the photographers who entered the contest and whose photographs appear in the 2024 MyLondon Exhibition; supporters who voted on the photos and gave constructive feedback, everyone who bought calendars, photos and cards on the annual crowdfunder and volunteers.

240 Project (Richard and Allie), Alex & Judi Berland, Chris Patten, The Connection at St Martin’s in the Fields (Max Webster and Marina Darco), the Corner Hotel (Arun Kumar, Germaine Joseph, Maria Dimitriu and Elize Sasman), David Chene, the Elizabeth line (Rhona Smith, Richard Baker, Adam Kapadia, Rosemary Brown, Joseph Griffiths and Charlotte Little), Homeless Link staff, Julian Parker (GPP), Lisa Wong, Nadine Holdsworth, Nikhil Srinivasan, Minet Library (Zoey Dixon), Riverside/One Support (Federico Gallo, Crestina Velia Forcina and Sarah De Winter), SHP (Aneta Zajac and Ruth Milne), Spitalfields (Ray Dervin), St Mungo’s Endsleigh Gardens (Linda Chin-Keow and Dorcas Kahiga), St Paul’s Cathedral (Nicholas Salmon and Mel Fleming), The Studio (Toni Benjamin), Tom Sales, Tom Sweetland and Wrik Gosh. Thank you MyWorld Creative Projects trustees: Michael Allwright, Rick Henderson, Katrina Treacy and Michael Wong. A special thank you to Julian Rouse and all the RPS volunteers for running the mentoring group, especially David & Judy Hicks, Pat Simmins and Fred Barrington.

Volunteers

Volunteers work on this project giving hours of their time – of course it would not be possible without them. Many volunteers are people who have participated in the programmes. The following are some of the activities done with the help of our unpaid volunteers:

hanging and swapping of artwork in the cafes and pop-up exhibitions
helping the camera handout in July
the exhibition selection panel
helping the participants select their 3 photos for the exhibition
helping the public vote week in August
editing and proofreading the exhibition captions and the MyLondon calendar
helping participants sell the calendar in the market
mentoring the photography group