Manor Gardens plans to build a centre to help young people struggling with their mental health, dedicated to the memory of Fabian Buxton

A CENTRE geared towards helping young black men with their mental health hopes to open in Islington in honour of a 24-year-old Finsbury Park resident who died following struggles with his mental health last year.

Fabian Buxton spent the last two years of his life working at Manor Gardens Welfare Trust, the health and wellbeing charity for predominantly minoritised communities, where he went “above and beyond” his job description to help people in need. He died on October 26, 2023, and an inquest will soon be heard to determine what happened.

Manor Gardens and Mr Buxton’s family have set up a working group to raise money so they can open a new building called Fabian’s Place, which will be a safe space for community members struggling with their mental wellbeing, especially young men and minoritised women.

Mr Buxton’s former manager at Manor Gardens, Laura Thomas-Hockey, said of his death: “It is really, really sad. He was really committed to the community and the people that he worked with, and he wasn’t worried about working with anybody. He would work with all types of people.

“After he died there were loads of people who would come in and ask where he was and say ‘can you take me to the doctor’s?’ And we’d say, ‘No, we don’t do that’. And they’d say, ‘Fabian, did that’. Or ‘can you come with me to get some new shoes?’ And we’d say, ‘No, we can’t’. And they’d say ‘Fabian did that’. Even though it wasn’t his job, he did it.

“He really went out of his way for people, and social justice was really important to him.”

At Manor Gardens, Mr Buxton worked as a youth worker on the Andover estate in Finsbury Park, which Fabian’s Place hopes to further support by expanding its existing youth provision to include mental health support and helping bereaved families.

Manor Gardens said the Andover is burdened by high rates of violent crime. Since the youth club opened in July 2022, four young men known to the service have been lost to gang violence. The local Somali community is particularly impacted with five young men lost to gang violence in the past two years.

The north of Islington has the highest number of residents living in one of the most deprived 20 per cent areas of England. The area also has the lowest life expectancy for men and the largest proportion of black and black British individuals.

Ms Thomas-Hockey: “You are three to four times more likely to suffer with a severe mental health issue like schizo­phrenia or bipolar if you’re a black man.

“The services that we want to have at Fabian’s Place are going to be culturally sensitive services. We want to train young people to be peer supporters, because that’s another thing that the research shows – that if you have somebody that understands what you’re going through and can support you as a peer, your outcomes are much better.

“All the research and studies have shown that because you need special­ist understanding about black mental health, and Fabian himself was failed by mental health services.

“He started having mental health problems in his first year of university. He’d had quite significant mental health problems, and then he had had quite a stable period, and then he came to work with us. He asked for help, and he didn’t get a mental health assessment, and he died.”

So far fundraising efforts have included a group of his friends running a marathon and a poetry night held on Mr Buxton’s birthday, as he was a spoken word poet. But the centre needs to raise a further £25,000 plus project costs.

Before he died, Mr Buxton explained how he felt about working at Manor Gardens. He said: “Working at Manor Gardens has been a life-changing experience for me. In a way, it is a microcosm for how society itself could and should be: people with various religions, ethnicities, backgrounds and identities all under one roof working towards the betterment of the whole community.”

• To donate, visit www.just­giving.com/crowdfunding/Fabiansplace