Community, connection and confidence are at the heart of Joshua Coombes’ #DoSomethingForNothing movement
Joshua Coombes knows the importance of a good haircut and it’s not just about a great fade and a well-layered fringe. “It’s a vehicle to connect with somebody. It’s a vehicle to listen,’’ he says. ‘‘I would love to click my fingers and fix somebody on the street’s life. What do you need? A flat? Psychosocial support for the next three years to work through all you’ve experienced? Access to rehabilitation facilities to overcome addictions you’re experiencing because of those traumas? I can’t go out today and do that. But I can show up. I can cut hair, and I can listen.”
It’s what keeps Joshua cutting hair on the streets, giving free trims to people for whom a professional haircut would normally be completely out of reach. A barber, like a local optician, is a key figure in any community, and like an optician, they’re providing a service that is by its nature tactile, intimate, and confessional: human connections that people sleeping rough or experiencing the extremes of poverty badly need and are often denied.
Community is hugely important to Joshua Coombes. He left school at 16 while living in Exeter, with no qualifications, no prospects and – coming from a working-class, single-parent household – no family money to fall back on. The future wasn’t looking great. “I was somebody who felt a great sense of failure,” he says. “I didn’t really have many options for moving forward.”
That combination can lead down dangerous paths. Fortunately for Joshua, it led to punk rock and a music scene of outsiders and misfits that looked after their own.
“It’s an integral part of this journey for me,” he says. “It gave me a sense of community, a sense of understanding. Punk was about togetherness and looking after the person who might be on the fringes.”
He’s now taken that sense of punk community into the social media age, gathering 150,000 followers on Instagram where he shares the stories of the people whose hair he cuts – people whose stories would otherwise go unheard or ignored. It��
