‘In this life, you have to help yourself’: Janette Collins MBE on 25 years of The Crib

Collins is affectionately known as ‘Mama Hackney’. Photograph: Hackney Council

I meet the white-haired Janette Collins MBE, aka ‘Mama Hackney’, who is interminably busy as you’d expect, in her car on a rainy evening in the middle of De Beauvoir estate. She is parked next to what at first glance seems like a hut — since my arrival I have been second-guessing whether I was even in the right place.

We spend a short while deciding where to do the interview, as the club inside is no doubt noisy and the vehicle is a cosy refuge from the encroaching autumn chill. She is on the phone to her daughter Kelly as we figure this out. After about a minute, we venture into her office.

The Crib is a modest, ramshackle building, but its plainness masks a wealth of history.

Spurred on by her own challenges as a young person — from falling into a local gang to becoming a teen mum at 14 — Collins has led its mission for social inclusion and youth intervention now for 25 years. But her community work has been going far longer.

“I was a single mum with two children. I’d heard they had this community hall, where young people can go and you can bring your kids in there.”

Here, at what would become Milton Gardens (later Stoke Newington Hub), it had dawned on her what could be done with a similar indoor space, where both kids and their put-upon parents could catch a break.

“It was more about getting the young people off that estate and showing them a wider picture of our environment, a wider picture of life,” she says. “But the core demographic were not easy recruits.

“We would go and say to young people: we’ve got the youth club, and they’d basically run away from us as if we were police. You had to sit in the area where they lived so they would realise we weren’t. So we’d do a survey asking: ‘if you had a youth club, what would you like to see going on?’ That’s when we started gaining their trust. More and more young people started coming.”

Janette with Crib worker, Yasmin. Photograph: Joe Steen

Over the next decade Collins gained recognition from the council’s youth services for her community engagement. After some time spent in America, she was later “headhunted” by the Town Hall for another intervention project aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour.

Meanwhile, she and other organisers were also busy spearheading Boroughs United, a youth talent showcase at the Hackney Empire that has seen the likes of Leona Lewis, dance group Diversity and Little Simz grace the stage. All this as she was pursuing a degree at University of Westminster.

She was set up with a spacious classroom in the now-closed Pitfield School for a time. Even when the establishment was forced to close, the savvy Collins smelled opportunity.

“They were going to redevelop it and turn it into flats. All that was left in the building was us, and we’d been given our room in kind. So then we had this entire school for our photography suite, room for two ping-pong tables, a pool room, and a dance space in the middle.”

Through a steady accumulation of small grant bids, Janette was able to set up a photography studio and darkroom for the centre. More funding came in, allowing her to take on staff to host dance workshops, games and sports.

“Each night we had around 75 children and young people from the ages of nine upwards, coming from all different areas: London Fields, Stoke Newington, Hoxton, De Beauvoir, Haggerston.”

In 2004, Janette was dealt the double-blow of losing her husband and potentially the Crib’s base itself, as the school was returned to the council’s hands.

“Obviously I couldn’t save the project. I was squatting,” she says, “and one of our management committees signed the school back. My hair turned white.”

The work didn’t stop, but instead was done from Janette’s house. It would be a year before The Crib found its new home, and indeed its name, on the De Beauvoir estate, in part due to Jackie Loftus from Hackney Homes. But it needed work.

“It was a cupboard. Everything was packed up, there were no windows. So young people from Hoxton came in and built it.”

The Crib’s HQ on De Beauvoir Estate. Photograph: Joe Steen

The endeavour to convert the glorified shed into a thriving youth club met with other challenges. Even in a borough as diverse as Hackney, “the area was very, very racist. They didn’t like the fact that loads of black kids were hanging around outside. It’s one of the hardest places that I’ve ever worked when it comes to racism.”

Sadly things were due to get worse.

“One day I had a call at home from someone telling me: the youth club is on fire. They smashed the window and threw a petrol bomb right through the building.”

The arsonists had stolen thousands of pounds worth of equipment, from computers to music technology, which was later sold back to the young people who had built and used them, Collins says.

The thief was caught, but not before trying to blame his crime on a local Black boy, she says. Community help and more funding thankfully meant they could try to rebuild from scratch.

For Collins, who has an uncanny eye for silver linings, this would serve as further proof that years of youth work were worth it.

“All you have to do is treat kids right and give them ownership of anything. Once you do that, they will never fail you. Never. That’s how we built this place.”

Owing to high demand, today the club possesses its own music production studio. It’s unsurprising that many members have launched entertainment careers. Others have followed their interests in criminology and psychology, no doubt inspired by the crueller reality of senseless violence that has persisted on the club’s periphery.

The club’s very own music production studio. Photograph: Joe Steen

In 2010, The Crib’s ‘youth rep’ Agnes Sina-Inakoju, was shot and killed in a Hoxton chicken shop. In 2014, Collins was calling for stricter laws for knife possession to “save lives”. Then, in 2015, hundreds of residents marched from Haggerston to the Town Hall for an ‘Enough is
Enough’ demo against gang violence. The protest began here, with the club’s organisers desperate to take action and find solidarity in the community amid a spate of killings that claimed the life of Moses Fadairo — a former club member who had since become a mentor to the Crib’s young people.

Collins takes some comfort from the fact that gang violence is not as bad as it was, though statistics show that violent crime rates have persisted in the last decade.

Convivial, with an earthy, wicked sense of humour, Collins is surrounded by pictures of the youths who have passed through her doors. There is a humility about her, overshadowed only by the pride she feels for the young people she has nurtured. It’s easy to see how she has been a guiding force for young people, and no doubt there is a maternal element, hence her nickname. But her brand of compassion is refreshing in its lack of sentimentality.

“I never wanted to be a person who was helped,” she insists. “In this life, you have to help yourself.”

The Crib is a transitory space, it seems, where young people can discover their own agency in shaping their lives. Self-reliance comes naturally to someone who has spent a quarter of a century running a youth charity.

“It’s like a road man hustle. [People] say they want to work together with you but when it comes to doing the funding together, it’s a different story.”

Brexit took away precious EU funding, and the Crib no longer receives money from the council.

An undoubtedly precarious journey like Collins’s depended on that secret ingredient of self-love and uncompromising humanity. “If it wasn’t for the strength of me believing in myself and believing in the young people, I wouldn’t even be here now.”

As the club turns 25, Collins mulls the idea of handing over her baby to the next generation. But she cherishes the rewards of decades working to improve young people’s lives — not counting the MBE received in 2020, for which Collins was nominated three times.

“I may have never earned more than £30k,” she says. “But I feel rich.”

Find out more at thecrib.org.uk.