About Us

The Chinatown Collective is a volunteer-led community interest company (CIC) dedicated to:

 

- heritage-making activities connected to London’s Chinatown;

 

- sustaining and supporting a vibrant volunteer group focused on heritage-making and community building; and 

 

- using heritage-focused activities to further social justice.

 

We recognise that our country and many of the systems within it do not benefit all people equally. Our work uses heritage making, community building and co-design practices to explore inequalities, apply and develop anti-racism practices, de-colonise heritage-making practices and histories, and build allyship with people whose voices and lived experiences are often marginalised.

 

We focus on community building principles and co-design practices in our work. We believe in the power of diversity and inclusion to enrich our work. The organisation’s activities include working with Chinatown’s different communities: the workforce, business owners, tourists, regular and occasional visitors, volunteers, social and civic services and the many regular contributors and collaborators in the area.

 

The beneficiaries of our work include: People of East and Southeast Asian heritage who are affected (willingly or unwillingly) by the ways in which Chinatown is presented and interpreted. Chinatown businesses and the people who own and work in them: Chinatown is often presented as a single, cohesive and mono-cultural community. The reality is a multi-layered area made up of people, businesses and community groups that reflect many different lived experiences. The visitors on which Chinatown depends: people joining these experiences are introduced to different ways of interpreting Chinatown that challenge stereotypes, encourages a more nuanced and sensitive interpretation of the neighbourhood and reflects the human experiences of the area rather than relying on symbolic representations of meaning in the neighbourhood.

 

Our work is led and coordinated by a group of committed volunteers.