The Care Café is an open-source and unfixed protocol; it is still developing and evolving as it encounters new questions, contexts and communities. Anyone can stage their own iteration in their local arts centre, church hall, shop front or front room. The life of the project is in the repetition, the reciprocity and the interconnection of disparate peoples and places through the principle of care and gathering. The radical power and personal comfort in acts of gathering can grow exponentially with the knowledge that the experience is being replicated in different locales worldwide—a truth perceived on a massive scale in the case of the 2017 Women’s March.

It re-appropriates some of the aesthetic of café culture, with the arrangement of small tables, quiet conversation and provision of shared food and drink. However, the space also acknowledges and dismantles the common social anxieties associated with these spaces: closed conversations between strangers, a school-canteen-esque difficulty in knowing where to sit and with whom. Just by entering the Care Café, participants acknowledged something of their own vulnerability, their needs in the present moment, and their desire to give and receive care. 

THE BACKSTORY

In the wake of the 2016 U.S. election and Brexit, the Care Cafe was conceived by Lois Weaver as a place – a real or virtual, public or domestic place for people to gather- their wits, thoughts and comrades in action. In response to this painful moment, she is proposing the Care Cafe as new call to conversation. Since this time Care Cafes have proved a fruitful space for gathering and joining together in community for conversation and completing mindless tasks of care. These tasks have included political activism, like writing letters to voters during the 2018 Midterm Elections in the U.S.