Helena Ismail

Another interview for Black History Month:

(Photo: Protestor at 2007 Hammersmith voluntary sector funding cuts demonstration).

Helena Ismail is British, very nicely-spoken, clever, committed to her community, and able to take a measured view of life's many shambles - except, perhaps, local and national politics. Right now, for instance, she seems pretty close to flattening whomever next claims that David Cameron's Tories are reformed and almost human. 'They (the Tories at Hammersmith and Fulham Council) have cut our throats,' she says tightly. 'They are targeting us. I tell you this. Why are they doing that?'

Ismail has run the much-admired Shepherd's Bush Somali support group Horn of Africa for 20 years, where she and her team provide an annual average of 3000 to 4000 poor, usually desperate, people with the immigration, employment and schools advice that they needed to settle in the UK, and get jobs, etc. Horn of Africa also does a good second line in helping newcomers to the country fill in forms and to get their heads round obligations like council tax. Horn of Africa will also help if you need to know how to deal with the many zealous coppers who play a large part in your life if you're poor, young and black.

The party's more or less over, though. In April this year, Hammersmith and Fulham's ghastly Tory council took a decision to cut exactly one hundred percent of Horn of Africa's funding (some £55,000 a year), as part of a charming borough rape of black and ethnic minority voluntary groups (other Somali groups like the youth support Hope 4 All organisation got nothing, while African and African-Caribbean support group Nubian Life got less than half the funding it received in 2006. You'll find the full funding report here pdf 404kb). The cuts took effect this month.

This story: the Cabinet at Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative Council meets to accept the Voluntary Sector Funding report which cuts funding to central and longstanding voluntary groups.

Photo: Hammersmith and Fulham Council leader Stephen Greenhalgh.

Introduction and background to the voluntary sector funding controversy at Hammersmith and Fulham

Photos from the protest at the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting

Splendid scenes at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall this week, when several hundred furious locals shouted the council's largely pale and male Tory cabinet members out of the meeting hall, and down towards the Town Hall latrines - the very place (I'm sure I've got this straight) where the H&F Tories first spawned.

The locals had turned up to protest about the council's plans to cut ('prioritise' is the word that the Tories are using at the moment) funding to Hammersmith and Fulham's voluntary sector.

Groups that work very closely with some of Hammersmith and Fulham's poorest communities have lost all their funding, and they are not thrilled. The Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre - a group of 12 experienced and committed lawyers that has been the legal brain of the Hammersmith voluntary sector together for nearly 30 years, and so often successfully highlighted council and government uselessness - has lost 60% of its funding.