Friends of The Joiners Arms began as a campaign for their favourite LGBTQI+ east London pub but over the past five years they’ve made big steps to secure a fully-accessible venue and even launched a successful Community Share appeal which bust their £100,000 target and was backed by more than 2,200 people. At the start of 2023 they were looking for that perfect venue. Here three of the FOTJA team – chairperson 37-year-old Amy Roberts (she/her), comms genius Prinx Silver (they/he) and treasurer Peter (he/him), 41, talk with James West about how working on the business plan helped FOTJA move the project to the next stages.  

Friends of the Joiners Arms’ business plan is pink, yellow, spotted, heart-studded and insightful. Inside is not just a regular five-year plan – although there’s plenty about employment, events, collaborations, opening times – but also insight into why London needs this LGBTQI+ space. “LGBTQI+ bars have historically been empowering spaces, offering sanctuary, self-discovery and employment, where friendships and romances are born, and communities thrive.” At least that was the case, but London has sadly “lost more than half (58 per cent) of its LGBTQI+ spaces in the 10 years leading up to 2015.” 

The Friends of the Joiners Arms (FOTJA) want their venue back – the original on Hackney Road was shut in 2014 after being bought by a property developer – but they also want to create an even better community-run queer space that is properly welcoming and “fully accessible” with “accommodations for disabled and neurodiverse people including “blind, deaf and/or neurodivergent people”. The plan is for the FOTJA to be a catalyst for social change, to collaborate, be transparent, offer employment opportunities and be a platform for performers, DJs and all those who assist them from sound technicians to photographers. Ideally FOTJA will also be in east London. 

Arguably FOTJA’s first success was getting Tower Hamlets council planners to tell developers that they must include a gay venue on the site of the Joiners Arms. 

In their other lives the FOTJA committee’s Amy (AR) is a scientist, Prinx Silver (Silver) is a freelance performer – well known for hosting Lèse Majesté cabaret – and Peter Cragg (PC) has a day job in Bethnal Green focussing on student data. 

JW: We met in 2020. You’d already got community asset recognition – that was a fantastic achievement and meant that whoever developed the site would have to have a LGBTQI+ venue. The business advice (12 hour) programme was run by the Greater London Authority (GLA). It was called Premises Ready and was for people who had approached the Mayor of London’s office about needing a venue. It was to help people get to a robust plan in place so when a venue was found they could make the most of it, rather than going ‘how do we make the maths work?’. 

AR: By that point we’d been campaigning for five years. Joiners Arms was an LGBTQI+ space on Hackney Road in east London. We got together to try and prevent closure, or to reopen the space. From there we learnt about other community campaigns to save pubs and learnt about the community benefit social model, particularly Ivy House in south London. They gave us helpful advice, including telling us it would be a long journey. The first few years we were fighting the property developer and focused around council proceedings and setting up FOTJA as a community benefit society. We’d gone through planning twice. Our initial aim was to reopen a community run queer space on that initial site. We’d listed the Joiners Arms as an asset of community value (ACV), also through Tower Hamlets and for the first time in planning history ensured that a space for LGBTQI+ was going to be protected and had to be run as an LGBTQI+ operator for its first 25 years. We would be able to compete for that lease, but it’s dependent on development going ahead. Today, still the Joiners sits empty.

JW: You are very much a campaigning organisation. My reflections are that you wanted to go to the next stage – a business plan to articulate where you wanted to go that worked with your community model.

PC: With the business plan I was expecting we’d get a template you’d help us fill out. Our question was ‘what the hell is a business plan?’ and your’s, back to us. was ‘what the hell is your business?’ This was not going to be a simple straightforward exercise. Being faced with that really challenged us to think ‘what are we doing and why’ and ‘who is it for’ and ‘what’s it going to look like’. We were quite united, but getting it out of our brains, through our mouths on to a piece of paper was something else.

JW: You were almost blindsided by having to win that lease. I could sense such collective energy and I was trying to nudge you to see another space or even service. Can you talk through that shift?

AR: We were a campaign group and now we were becoming a business. You helped us separate out those two things. The way we were doing the business plan allowed us to see that a space could be anywhere, and then it got really exciting.

JW: You were you suddenly in control, when you said in this business we are going to be “creating, finding, driving…” Did that change your motivation?

AR: Yeah. The business plan led to us knowing we needed to raise some funds.

JW: We’d finished on the funded programme but FOTJA had really connected with me, so I said if you need me I’m here. Why did you get back in touch with me?

AR: In 2021 we applied for Co-operatives UK programme grant. We submitted our draft business plan as part of our application which felt really great – to get communities ready to launch their share. We got a £10,000 grant, the most money we’d ever received. Part of that was to finalise the business plan and launch the campaign for the community to buy shares in our society.

JW: It’s nice to work with an organisation for a longer period of time. First version was thrashed out, the second time it had really settled in. I remember how we felt when we cracked

cash flow and modelling and were moving to ambition, asking how are we going to keep reaching people?

PC: It was like having a piece of marble and chipping away at it enough until you get to the statue that had been there all along. When it did make sense and the pieces finally fell into place then everything became easy. Because we’d done so much guided work in those early stages where we’d pulled out ‘what is our organisation, what’s our goal, who are we doing it for, what are we doing already and how can we build on that’ we’d got to specific nitty gritty like marketing and cash flow forecasts.

Once we cracked the technical side of what was expected we’d already done all the work, like what sort of food we were going to sell, or know how many people will sit on a Tuesday and watch a queer cinema programme. We really went to the root of who we were trying to serve, and going through that progress made the later stages much easier – doing a community share, and a go live date. We already had cash flow forecasts scenarios for three different paths over three years, so had to get on with it.

AR: I vividly remember meeting at a pub on a week night, and thinking we have the skills we need, we’ve nailed it. We’d done all that work. There was time pressure, but we felt that we knew what we were doing.

JW: As you went into the community share fundraiser how did you feel?

Silver: We knew what we were doing. We weren’t just asking people for money or we will not open the pub. Our business plan was like our website – we designed everything with our identity, well designed and curated for the FOTJA – digestible for people who wanted to look at it. We were very transparent, we’ve been working on it for two years and we are not just asking you for money. It was clear and accessible for people.

JW: Did you get feedback?

AR: I remember the share sale launched and then seeing the donations come in, and I was wondering how many people are going to read the business plan. It was nerve-wracking thinking are we going to meet that target (there was a minimum we had to reach else we’d receive no money). There were no nerves about have we done this right – I was so proud we have worked so hard on the idea and the plan.

PC: Because we’d done all that work and because we had the business plan and share sale document and been through everything on a micro level – including agreeing the identity and aesthetic of everything – so when doing the share sale we carried ourselves with confidence from doing that. I was expecting people to email us saying ‘on page 7 you expect to sell 70 cheese toastie on the third Wednesday of every month and do you really think that’s accurate’, but actually we had confidence and legitimacy that we learnt working with you and Co-Operatives UK so when we did the share sale people could feel that.

JW: Right at the start I said to you, who are you writing the business plan for? It’s the first question I always ask. Second time around we very much knew the audience

PC: When you originally asked who the business plan was for, on reflection it was actually for us, and maybe that’s why it was difficult at first as we were teaching ourselves everything about our business.

AR: One thing we did was the Community Shares Standard Mark Assessment before the launch of the shares sale – through Co-operatives UK our business plan was also reviewed and verified in great detail by an independent reviewer so we had that confidence (to ensure documents meet national standards of best practice) – we knew it was transparent, had enough detail and made sense. We were asking the community for a lot of money, but this made us extra confident that we had solid plans and were making solid promises. It was the first time we’d ever fundraised like this. We were very clear we were never going to ask people for money unless we knew exactly what we were going to do with it.

JW: How did the community shares campaign go?

PC: We needed to raise £100k, we got to two-thirds of the way with a few days to go and then in the last weekend before it closed it went absolutely bat shit. We’d get an email every time somebody purchased a share, and they were coming in so quickly every time I refreshed my phone it would download 400 emails, so we went over the 100 grand and raised £126,000.

AR: I remember going to bed on the Friday and thinking we were on £70k. I thought ‘ok that’s not too bad, we might get to 80 and then we could really push it in that planned extended deadline’. And then it just exploded, reaching £100k on Sunday afternoon, so for those 36 hours we were taking in £1,000 per hour!

Silver: I was working at a festival. It was 70k on the Saturday, then 24 hours went by and I wasn’t on my phone. The following day I woke up, it was 3pm, and I had so many messages. “Where is Silver, what’s going on? Have you heard the news?’ Insta exploded – we’d reached £100,000 – my phone was on fire.

AR: Silver led the social media campaign and marketing plan and nailed it. So funny that you were offline in those last 24 hours! We had such a brilliant marketing plan, Silver had nailed for weeks and weeks.

JW: As a punter watching on that last weekend, the social media campaign felt exciting and I felt pride and sheer joy at you hitting it.

AR: A lot of organisations, like Co-Operatives UK commented that ‘you’ve got across what can be really technical and boring information in a really exciting way. A lot of people were really impressed by our social media campaign which Silver led – they’d get people to join in and build up the excitement over those 10 weeks.

JW: Where you are now and what does 2023 look like…

Silver: Hopefully opening the venue. This is the trickiest part as we have different things on our list we need – and the priorities like accessibility – and then all the work that comes through that.

AR: After the intensity of the share sale we’ve been setting up connections with councils and are now ready to ramp up the energy and the work we put into that. We’ve got a list of what we are looking for and pushing different connections we’ve made and waiting for a suitable site to come up. But we’ve kind of gone back to not being so in control of the next steps.

PC: We did a lot of work on milestones with you, James – where we were looking at ‘let’s break this down’. Now we’ve moved on to the next milestone, it’s a bit intimidating because finding the venue is probably the hardest thing we will do. Everything has a structure now, even down to hiring the team, and we’ve worked through all those things with you. It’s almost like putting the plan into action, rather than working out what the plan is.

JW: Future milestones always come with a moment of ‘oh that’s quite a steep hill to climb’. That’s the joyful challenge of growing pains. It doesn’t go away, what changes is your resilience or appetite or drive towards them.

AR: I’m so proud of being successful and blown away by the support given by the community – over 2,200 people.