There are lots of ways to get involved and help re-open the Black Cap: from following our social media to helping us run them, from handing out a few flyers to joining our management committee, from giving a few pounds to pledging a large donation.

Press the buttons below to find out more about the different things you could do to save the Black Cap..

Our ‘vigils’ are the public face of the campaign. Every Saturday from 2 to 4 pm we stand outside the Black Cap to hand out flyers and talk to people about the campaign.

The vigils keep the campaign visible and show that the Black Cap is still an LGBTQ+ space even while it’s closed. They’re a great way to show your support for the Black Cap. Drop by to say hello and pose for a photo with one of our ‘I Am The Black Cap’ cut-out wigs, or stay awhile and help give out flyers.

Standing outside a closed pub may not sound much fun but every week we have great conversations with people who want to share their memories of the Cap or who are interested in supporting independent pubs and LGBTQ+ spaces. And the more of us there are, the more fun it is!

Find us on the pavement outside the Black Cap, 171 Camden High Street, every Saturday 2-4 pm. It’s in between Boots and the bus stop, close to Camden Town station.

We very rarely cancel vigils but if we do, it will be announced on our social media, so check before you come along.

Two big areas where we’d like to strengthen our team are finance and engagement. We currently manage these okay but as the campaign moves into its next phases we’d like to have more team members with expertise in:

• finance, fundraising, grants, and capital-building – especially for arts and entertainment venues and community projects;
• social media, communications, publicity, newsletters, press releases, public engagement events, etc.

If this is you, please get in touch!

We can always use the help of a few more energetic and committed people to give a general helping hand.

The campaign involves a lot of miscellaneous tasks, from attending meetings to answering press questions to fact-checking to looking for funding sources to carrying and storing things to writing and checking documents. A lot of the time it’s simply a case of ‘quick, xyz needs doing, who’s free to do it?’

If you’re someone who’s willing and able to turn your hand to various different things and jump in to help when help is needed, you could be a great addition to our team and a great help to the campaign, so we’d like to hear from you.

We think it’s very important for the Black Cap to welcome and embrace all parts of the LGBTQ+ community including those that tend to get under-served or pushed to the edges, like women, trans people, people of colour, disabled people, and migrants. The Black Cap was always one of London’s most inclusive and diverse LGBTQ+ venues and that must continue when it re-opens.

To make sure we achieve that, we want the campaign team to have more expertise and experience from those different parts of the community, and to build more relationships with them. If you can help us strengthen our team’s diversity and connections with under-represented parts of the community, or you’d like to put us in touch with someone who can, please drop us a line.

We aren’t currently doing large-scale fundraising but we do appreciate small donations – see our Donate page. Depending on what happens with the plans for re-opening, we may well need to do some major fundraising in the next year or two. This could be to cover some of the costs of putting together a leasehold or freehold offer. Or it could be to actually raise some or all of the money to buy or lease the building, either on our own or as part of a consortium. Raising big money would mean applying for grants and tapping potential ‘high value’ donors, but it might also mean calling for donations, big and small, from everyone who wants to help the Black Cap re-open. So – watch this space!’

Black Cap Community is a community benefit society, which means it’s owned by its members (shareholders) and each member has one vote (no matter how many shares they have). At the moment we aren’t selling shares to the general public, because we need to keep this as a fundraising option once we’ve worked out how much we need to raise (see Our plan). But if you’re interested in buying shares, you can register your interest.

Being a shareholder gives you a vote in how Black Cap Community is run and how it handles the campaign. Our plan is for Black Cap Community to buy the Black Cap, which will mean our shareholders will own it.

If you’d like us to contact you if / when shares go on sale, use our action form to register. Question three (‘contribute money’) gives you an option to be contacted about buying a share.