Sandra Stewart Meets Cocoa Magazine's Serlina Boyd

The wandering carousel of constant zoom meetings has been exhausting, to say the least. It had taken me to New York, London and back again all within the space of a week and I was at my wits’ end. Yet just when I was so fed up with online meetings that I was ready to throw the iPad into the local pond, along came a long-anticipated engagement with Serlina Boyd, Founder and Publishing Director at Cocoa Publishing, the UK’s first black children's magazine!

Turning on the political light in a 10-year-old

The catalyst for the brand’s development was a desire to raise the confidence levels of Serlina’s 6-year-old daughter after experiencing racially motivated bullying at her school. This is a reality that many of you parents and guardians reading this can attest to. The idea spiralled from a homemade book created by Serlina and her husband (featuring 30 black faces) to a magazine front cover mock up. Serlina has a background in graphic art creation and these ideas culminated in them ultimately sharing their pre-launch image and idea online to gauge support.

The homemade book created by Serlina and her husband would eventually spiral into a much bigger project.

Well, the support was overwhelming, and a resounding chorus of yes’ made the decision to take plans to the full-blown publication stage, easy.

A radical solution to the lack of representation of black people in the UK media was born. Hip hip? Hooray!

OBV has decided to start ‘em young. We have plans to collaborate with Cocoa Publishing (CP) in a bid to initiate an interest in soft politics from an early age.

Who makes decisions for the country and how? It’s a simple question with a broad number of answers. Let’s give these little ones the tools to find this out and hopefully, along the way, garner an interest in them that sees them aspire to be one of those decision-makers themselves.

‘identity affirming, culturally aware and proud’

Currently publishing two titles and distributing worldwide, CP aims one magazine at the young girls. CocoaGirl is a monthly publication and CocoaBoy, bi-monthly. The magazines are identity affirming, culturally aware, proud and let the young readers, typically aged between 7 to 14 years, drink in endless images of youngsters and adults who look just like mini them! As well as this, it allows them to be inspired and empowered by content designed to support parents and carers. All of whom it depicts achieving, learning, diversifying and enjoying the public stage.

It’s packed with features on aspirational youngsters achieving great things in several alternative spaces, which is in contrast to the mainstream depiction of black children. Cocoa is showcasing pioneering good news stories, role models of excellence and endless tales of success.

Cocoa magazine's focus on young black girls and boys offers a legitimately groundbreaking alternative in the world of magazine publishing.

We’ve had features such as ‘Cocoa Excellence’ - featuring go-getting black girls and boys. There are wonderfully vibrant games, competitions and quizzes on afro hair care, healthy eating, black history and even a specific awareness campaign surrounding vitiligo in the first issue of Cocoa Girl. It’s a truly educationally enriching glossy. Most of these subjects are not being taught unless you attend supplementary school.

This month’s front cover for CocoaBoy will feature a member of the public that has entered a competition to feature as the cover image. CP have pride themselves on not selecting their cover shots in the same way other magazines do traditionally.

Charitable ambitions

The Cocoa brand also sets its sights on showing young black children how to write their own books and publish their own works.

We all need to say thank you to Serlina for her bravery in initiating a really tangible, instant offering for a positive identity for all of our young black children. Let’s see if we can help CP continue to fill the magazines month after month with inspirational black role models and their equally fascinating tales.

Are you a Black Child Supplementary School?

Cocoa Publishing would love to hear from any Supplementary Schools that teach black children. You can reach them on hello@thecocoadream.com

Lastly, Cocoa Magazine are up for the Holly&Co NEWCOMER AWARD which rewards the outstanding new small businesses of the year! There's still time to vote and you can do so by clicking the link here. We're voting Cocoa but there are a number of outstanding small businesses that have come to the fore this year.

Sandra Stewart

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A call to action...

For 24 years OBV have fought to ensure black and minority ethnic participation and representation in civic society. Efforts in continuing to do so though, relies on your help. That way we can continue this fight for greater race equality. What would give us a tremendous boost is if today, you made that small donation yourselves, but even more importantly if you encouraged others to do likewise.