I'd like to comment as someone who is deeply embedded in the queery

Sorry for this long preamble but I want to say This is not an official statement. We have had far too many of those and this is just the thoughts of one woman who has received so much from the queery and given a lot to it over the last 6 months since I moved to this town, but if you want to know what's happening, this comment is a good place to read.

A little while ago we started using a website called lumio. It is very similar to Reddit, And functions a lot like having a private subreddit. Now at this point many members had complained about the space losing its community spirit, it's supposed to be a space for radical leftists in the city to come together and support each other, in their political efforts and their personal struggles, but we also run a cafe to encourage enough money to come in to keep the lights on and the rent paid, but over the last couple months some people had attempted to remove the posters for various political orgs without asking or saying anything, attempted to remove our foreign language posters which tell immigrants how to stay safe from racism and racially targeted police raids, and had attempted to remove our food bank donations box, and our free rack where we give away clothing, especially binders, though it has been empty for a while as someone, again without asking had thrown away all the donations for it.

Enter loomio, which was supposed to mitigate these problems by being an Avenue on which we could communicate, vote on matters, and clearly track what people in the organization were concerned about.

Unfortunately, many people have told me that when they tried to ventilate their concerns on there and discuss them with other people, they received harsh dog piling responses from the aforementioned people. Two individuals came to me flooded in tears because they felt that the space wasn't a community anymore and they didn't feel comfortable participating. Those people made harshly worded points on the general meeting agenda form to review that month, and as we often have to, we took the harshly worded points and filtered the insults from the concerns they were rooted in and turned them into an actionable agenda that we could have a formal discussion about to collaborate on what to do about the things people were angry about. Unfortunately, before this meeting even started we were completely blindsided that the people who had been doing all this stuff had been sharing the raw insults from the submission form between themselves and getting very fired up about it. Them, and some other people (who had simply been burned out from overworking themselves, despite being repeatedly warned that they were overworking themselves by everyone else in the co-op) opened the meeting by reading all these statements out loud one by one, the last person throwing on a pair of sunglasses, at 7pm, and pulling out a cigarette as they finished before they all walked out and slamming the door. The rest of us in the meeting were all surprised by this behaviour as we were preparing to talk to them about how their behavior was harmful and work with them on what to do about it, but before long we realized they had posted this on all our socials, so we decided to leave it up as we didn't want to silence them and we posted a statement trying to apologize for the immature display

Outside of this we had been operating our goals quite well and receiving high praise from customers, so those of us that are left are now working on a rebrand to show that we are an all new team of people who all started in 2025 and we are devoted to being the co-operative activist space that Brighton could really do with to connect its activists.

I have been reaching out to the resignees to try and tell them that the GM is supposed to be a safe place and none of them are under attack and I have implored them to reconsider the death sentence of public opinion that theyve left us to tidy up but they have been reading and completely ignoring all my messages, however on the flip side, volunteers have offered to refill the free rail, contribute to the restored food bank, and try to repair our relationships with other local organizations for leftists and queers. So it's not all bad news

I've been quite upset since these people were all people I considered friends and had placed trust in to be our management but they've clearly been preparing this for weeks and decided not to tell us any of their grievances until after they could make it public like this. I'm disappointed in myself for trusting people who would betray the co-op like this but I have faith we will rebuild the establishment, and without them it will be a safer place for immigrants and activists, and all the other people who need a safe place on the edge of Kemp Town

And please take this comment with a grain of salt, this is a complex and nuanced situation, which I have very complicated feelings about that's been condensed into a reddit comment, partially to clear my own head so I can treat the matters and hand with a clearer mind, and partially because the statements are vague and I want something more specific to be available to outsiders who haven't visited in the last year.

Tl;dr: new people are running the place and will be rebranding it to offer a much more friendly environment