"Giving up might have made financial sense, but whenever I considered another career, I felt that the trauma, pain and lived experience needed somewhere useful to go. I could not simply leave that knowledge behind...My question remains: how do we create peace, rather than how do we punish violence?"

Guest Blog for Social Founders, written by

Akemia Minott, Founder & Director, 84Youth CIC in Moss Side

Building a social enterprise from lived experience means carrying grief, community responsibility and refusal to accept that anyone’s life is disposable. My purpose as a social founder isn’t measured only by outputs or funding cycles. It’s about creating the conditions in which peace, dignity and hope become possible.

As a youth and community worker for over two decades, and founder of 84YOUTH, I’ve stood alongside young people and families navigating violence, trauma and loss. I’ve witnessed young people I loved through long-term youth work relationships be killed, and I’ve sat with parents hearing their child’s final moments described in court.

I’ve taken mothers to hospital to say goodbye, been present when parents learned their missing child’s body had been found, and read obituaries at children’s funerals. I’ve answered calls at 3am from mothers trying to find a reason to live. And I’ve shared grief with young people who were supporting me while I supported them.

My understanding didn’t begin with professional training. Growing into adulthood in Moss Side, Greater Manchester, I learned to distinguish fireworks from gunfire through survival. One of the first murders I encountered was a fourteen-year-old boy outside a takeaway. I arrived moments after the shot. What I remember is silence: the stillness trauma imprints onto memory.

I call this Perpetual Trauma: not an event that has ended, but a condition renewed by each incident, police cordon and headline. It lives in places we pass daily, sounds that return us to particular moments, and memorials we hold so parents know their children have not been forgotten.

In my twenties, someone I loved deeply was killed. Of fifteen people involved, only two were prosecuted - for affray; they spent about three months in prison. Grief was physically overwhelming. My daughter, then six months old, was what got me out of bed. That loss taught me how trauma lives in the body through hypervigilance, nightmares, numbness and survival responses.

At his mother’s funeral in 2025, almost thirty years after his death, I remembered our first meeting after losing him - she seemed to search my face for answers. We held each other silently, and that connection stayed with me. I recognise her pain in the mothers I support today. That experience helped shape the direction of my life.

Violence does not begin in courtrooms. It develops within conditions shaped by inequality, exclusion and unequal opportunity, long before an investigation or trial. The people I support have taught me how trauma, fear and decisions made under pressure can have devastating consequences in seconds. Our starting points can be worlds apart, even when we want the same things from life.

The catalyst for setting up 84YOUTH was 8 August 2017: guilty verdicts in a ‘joint enterprise’ case involving thirteen young people, eight of whom I’d worked with for years. The case remains sensitive because of anticipated appeal proceedings, so I can’t revisit its details here. That evening, I witnessed an attack on their friends. Four young people were stabbed; Sait Mboob lost his life. These were people and families I knew, not an abstract problem to be managed.

Choosing to stand with families had already cost me a paid role. Before the 2017 trial, I was told attending court was too political and might upset the police and council. I resigned. My responsibility was to my community; withdrawing from relationships built over years was not an option. That tension between institutional comfort and community need remains central to why 84Youth exists.

I remain concerned about how stereotypes shape the stories told about young people in court. Knowing the people behind a case changes what you can hear in those descriptions. My ambition reaches beyond helping families to endure the process: I want change - from policing through to the Crown Court, so that lived experience informs how justice is understood and practised. Ideally there would be significant cultural and systemic changes that would prevent so much of the direct violence I work around.

When existing organisations seemed unable to challenge injustice or stand at the frontline when needed, a group of young people I’d worked with over many years and I began planning our own organisation. We didn’t start with a conventional business idea. We started with loss, injustice and a responsibility we could no longer ignore.

After exploring different structures, we chose a Community Interest Company (CIC), which felt simpler and less restrictive than pursuing charitable status. The status arrived on 19 September 2019, just before the pandemic. The structure gave us room to develop paid work alongside funded activity, without losing sight of why we existed.

The pandemic brought uncertainty, but also small funding opportunities responding to the disproportionate harm experienced by minoritised and deprived communities. We were already connected to those who needed support. During the lockdowns we delivered outreach, Instagram Live sessions, mental health support and food distribution, and helped young people access computers and internet connections so they could continue learning.

Our wider work supported people affected by high-visibility violence, both direct and systemic: group work, mentoring, street-based sessions, open-mic nights and recording studio access. We developed professional training on Perpetual Trauma and supported parents whose children were victims or defendants in ‘joint enterprise’ cases. Alongside delivery came advocacy, trials, trauma support for people unable to access professional help, therapeutic work for the team - and the never-ending demands of running a community organisation.

By early 2024, funding was increasingly difficult. With Lankelly Chase deciding to close their foundation on ethical grounds, I supported team members into full-time study or employment. They were now young adults who needed more than the part-time wages we could offer. They remain part of the organisation through relationships built over years; the change was about their futures, not the end of their commitment.

My focus that year was supporting up to twenty-three families through two murder trials over seven months. Afterwards, my head stopped working, I went to the doctor and was soon diagnosed with very high ADHD and complex PTSD. The work had demanded everything at precisely the point when there was least funding to sustain it.

For much of 2024, I worked without funding while doing a separate job at night to live. My small savings disappeared quickly. Giving up might have made financial sense, but whenever I considered another career, I felt that the trauma, pain and lived experience needed somewhere useful to go. I could not simply leave that knowledge behind.

Rather than reshape the work to fit available funding, I began developing materials addressing the systemic and cultural conditions behind the harm. I knew that funding for work that challenged the status quo would be difficult, particularly without charitable status. My second job gave me some independence to pursue what I believed was necessary, while beginning to heal and understand how to work with my ADHD.

Accessing support for my own needs exposed the same barriers I see others face: waiting lists, limited sessions and decisions made by people I have never met. Last year, therapy ended just as I was beginning to understand my trauma. I reapplied and waited nine months. After three weeks with a CBT therapist, I was told I needed a multi-disciplinary therapist, which meant returning to a waiting list.

Two years into this process, I am finally beginning to feel emotions beyond anger and numbness. If navigating support is this difficult for an adult with the vocabulary, understanding and determination to leave survival mode, what is it like for a young person? Organisations such as 42nd Street offer vital support, but the need far exceeds their capacity.

The diagnoses have helped me understand my own intensity: my sense of justice, empathy and difficulty stepping away. I used to struggle to understand why others didn’t feel things as strongly. I’m now gentler in how I approach professionals, not because the truth has changed, but because reducing defensiveness can make it easier to hear.

I remain unapologetic about the experiences we bring into the room. If our truth causes discomfort, I want that discomfort examined rather than our voices withdrawn. Getting people across sectors to listen is difficult; securing sustained commitment to change is harder. Conforming to expectations cannot be the price of doing work whose purpose is to challenge them.

A small grant from the AB Charitable Trust this year has given me time towards writing a book drawing on lived experience - to deepen professionals’ understanding of trauma, inequality and violence. It focuses on young people and families navigating the criminal justice system, encouraging fairer, more compassionate, trauma-informed practice.

Drawing on deeply personal experiences of loss and more than two decades spent alongside young people and families affected by violence, the aim of my book is to take readers beyond the headlines and into the lives that continue long after the police cordons disappear and the courtroom falls silent. It bears witness to the anguish of bereaved parents, the fear of families watching a child stand accused, and the unseen weight carried by children growing up where safety is uncertain and grief arrives before earlier wounds have had time to heal.

Exploring perpetual trauma, inequality and joint enterprise, my book asks what is lost when a young person’s life is reduced to an incident, a label or a prosecution’s story, and when anger or emotional numbness is judged without understanding the pain beneath it.

Neither an excuse for harm nor a retreat from accountability, this is an appeal to recognise the humanity of everyone drawn into the criminal legal system, without diminishing the irreversible devastation of a life taken. At its heart lies both a challenge and a hope: that justice shouldn’t start with delivering punishment after tragedy, and that lasting peace begins when we invest in care, belonging and opportunity. After years of responding to immediate crises, writing offers another way to make that experience useful.

I have also completed a short, trauma informed manual for parents attending court, whether their child is on trial or has been killed. And other work we deliver uses purpose-made videos, interactive workshops and dialogue to explore the real impact of violence. I’ve now adapted this programme to deliver to criminology/law students, doing my first guest lecturer class this week at the University of Manchester. The idea is to bring lived experience into a space where it might otherwise be absent.

I aim to help professionals recognise distressed behaviour shaped by survival, rather than seeing only behaviour that challenges them. When a young person reaches an investigation or a courtroom, there is already a history that requires understanding, and the systems surrounding it challenged, rather than treating a moment of crisis as the whole person while absolving all responsibility from the societal inequalities that may have fed into it.

As a social founder, balance remains elusive. Even away from work, some part of my mind is processing an experience, working through a problem or considering what comes next. Hyperfocus makes switching off particularly difficult, but I suspect many social founders recognise this. The passion that led us to start something does not conveniently disappear during leisure time. I do sometimes wonder how present I actually was when my children were small. If I raise this they tell me they had a great childhood and that they’re proud of what I do.

The hardest moments are when another incident happens. My body moves into fight, flight or freeze just when people most need support. At other times, with no money, depleted energy and little visible progress, another career can seem appealing. Yet I struggle to imagine work that would allow me to use what I know while retaining the freedom to challenge what needs changing.

I’m sure social founders resonate when I say, the organisation and the person can’t always be neatly separated. Relationships, memory and responsibility sit behind delivery. Unrestricted funding mattered because it let me respond to that reality, including paying myself, rather than treating my own survival as separate from the work.

I think that being on a panel about overcoming systemic violence and empowering community with Kat Cleaver, Black Panther activist and academic, is probably my proudest moment. Particularly as she’s a professor now and the rest of the panel were academics, yet she said that if the Black Panthers still existed, they’d be doing exactly the work that I do!

My question remains: how do we create peace, rather than how do we punish violence? That means addressing trauma, inequality, exclusion and the conditions in which harm takes root. It means trusting communities and valuing knowledge earned through experience, even when that knowledge makes institutions uncomfortable.

Peaceful communities don’t have increased policing, guilty verdicts and harsher sentencing. Peaceful communities are created with adequate resources, sustainable relationships, and hope for the future.

Thank you for reading my blog. Please do leave your comments below, and if able to, contribute a donation to our work.

Akemia Minott, Founder & DIrector, 84Youth, Moss Side.
Connect with Akemia on LinkedIn.