Half-Way To Heaven...

It's approaching the mid-point of the Family Cafe project so here's a bit of an update and a sharing of some ideas that have have percolated through as we move the project onwards and upwards...

We started of with a simple enough remit: to run a community cafe on surplus and do our bit to showcase what can be done with food destined for the skip... On that count we have been wildly successful and those images of delicious dishes have been producing much-salivation across the Twitter-sphere, FaceBook world and beyond. Our partner: FareShare consider us to be a flagship cafe in that we use as much fresh produce as they can supply us with to create tasty, health-full and colourful food that really inspires as well as nourishes people. Many food banks don't take fresh produce, which is of course, the stuff that really needs using, so we at Family Cafe are a fantastic outlet for FareShare to distribute to. And we always make a point of showing new FareShare volunteers how our project works and getting them to share a meal if we can. It's partnership working and it's an extension of our whole ethos which is about sharing and co-creating to the betterment of everyone. 

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We didn't have any numerical targets particularly, but by serving a tea time meal 4 nights per week (or lunches during the school holiday's) by sending the stuff we can't use (a lone tin of spuds or a few packets of noodles) to the local food bank, and by sending a cooked meal over to our local youth centre (to be distributed in their cafe) every week, we are on target to serve/distribute 10,000 meals during our year-long pilot project. 

That is a pretty freaking awesome display of what our model can do on surplus and by using a one-pot, sharing and caring model, don't you think!

If we had a venue with great footfall within a local area with lots of on-board people that could populate our dining room with an awareness of what we are trying to achieve then I believe we could easily surpass this figure, easily launch our concept of social eating into the bigger consciousness and have it do what it does on a bigger and bolder scale.

A space where social eating occurs on a grander scale... Maybe a City centre one? or a high-street near you one? I'm questing on this space... It's out there somewhere....

Our other remit was to try and address food poverty and create spaces where we can all enjoy affordable food by simplifying the conventional model of food choices and focusing instead on a one-meal, one-pot, everyday is a 'special' type format which means we can offer a meal for a donation. 

How successful has this been? Well in all honesty it's been a success of sorts. I really think our model works to deliver hugely accessible food and we have certainly had our share of unaccompanied kids and people of benefit sanctions... However, in addressing food poverty I believe I have ended up leading the project somewhere I don't want to actually be- and that's in the midst of food poverty...

Let me explain. What you focus on is where your energy and attention go. It's only be doing that I really get to understand and it's part of my personal, ongoing journey to working out what I love doing that has made me see that I want the project to move elsewhere with a renewed focus... I believe in abundance, celebration and appreciation. In co-creation, collaboration, social eating, social sharing and shared betterment...

My funding for Family Cafe came in part because I was so eloquently able to transmit my frustration with wasteful practices around conventional cafe culture and because I lived in an area where I was able to witness and flag up the crazy spectacle of hungry kids in our City, link this to food surplus and tie it up in the Family Cafe model. It also came about as I have a big gob and can communicate my huge passion and simple vision, and because people just 'get' what Family cafe is about and we have been blessed with quite brilliant volunteers and helpers. 

Being based in Sneinton has meant that we have been funded as we can demonstrate the need and efficacy, but next year I want to re-focus on the surplus angle and what our social eating model can do for everyone.

I will be running a flagship cafe somewhere where it can thrive and sustain itself. I have received lots of lovely ask's for more of these cafes and initially thought about setting up more of them but I've decided instead to set up a social eating flagship to beam out our social eating signal, a toolkit you can use and a powerful ethos and brand that you can downstep and tweak to suit your neighbourhood and it's needs. A family of Family Cafe's is the proverbial bun that's in my oven... Currently cooking. I'll keep you posted on our progress. 

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