Cafes
Cafés bring people together in a comfortable environment to talk about issues that matter in order to meet specific goals.
What It Is
The café approach involves gathering people in a comfortable environment for coffee, conversation, and learning around critical issues. In the café approach, people are invited to sit together to share experiences and ideas in extended conversation. Cafés can be used as a way for educators to convene and talk with one another for professional learning, as a method for bringing families and educators together for dialogue and to learn from each other, or as a way to create deeper peer-to-peer relationships among families.
How It Works
Used globally to tackle concerns and challenges, the café approach, based on the World Café model, is a small-group conversation process that facilitates consensus building and strategic planning.¹ Cafés are often guided by seven main principles, which include: setting the context, creating hospitable space, exploring questions that matter, encouraging everyone’s contribution, connecting diverse perspectives, listening for patterns and insights, and sharing collective discoveries.² Although there are a variety of ways to organize a café, generally a “host” welcomes participants to a café-like environment. Participants and a “table host” sit four or five to a table and discuss a question of common interest, with the table host facilitating the conversation. After 15 or 20 minutes, the table host stays in place while the participants move to other tables and discuss a different question.³ At the culmination of a café, someone from each group shares — or “harvests” — what is learned with the larger group so participants walk away with a collective experience and a sense of how to move forward.
What Changes
Companies, communities, and institutions have used the café method to improve processes, redesign cultural exhibits, and articulate their goals for improving schools. Conversations help people come to a new level of shared understanding around real-life issues and in turn want to make a difference.⁴ The approach creates opportunities for people to connect that, in turn, provides a platform for building trusting relationships that lead to ever-deepening conversations.⁵ For example, when used with emotional intelligence trainers in New Zealand, the method contributed to a “readiness to talk” and a willingness to listen, which then led to more trusting relationships among participants. In addition, conversations that occur in a World Café setting can plant the seeds for further collaborative efforts.⁶
Approach in Action
Friday Café
The Friday Café began in Connecticut in 2014 as a way to bring together professionals who focus on family engagement efforts in their schools and districts. The event often starts with a TED Talk-style presentation on a topic relevant to those working with families. But a major focus of the sessions is to allow each participant — who is often the only professional in that role at their school or organization — to share experiences, challenges, and ideas. The various settings in which the gatherings are held, such as museums and historical venues, also become an important part of the experience, sparking ideas among the participants regarding events they could organize for families.
The model has since spread to San Diego and San Mateo in California, and, in addition to school district personnel, other participants who work with families at libraries, community-based agencies, and in higher education have also found that the peer-to-peer exchange meets their needs and helps them to be more effective in their professional roles. Participants share that the Friday Café events leave them feeling refreshed and more supported in their work.
Parent Café
Project Eagle, an early childhood program of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Kansas Medical Center, created the Parent Café as a way to help parents create more meaningful interactions with one another. Once a month, after the children are dropped off in the morning, master teachers and family support coordinators greet parents and welcome them for fresh coffee, snacks, and conversation. Parents have casual conversations on topics of interest that range from child nutrition to car seat safety and ESL classes. Other conversation topics at the Parent Café include GED classes and at-home learning activities. In the program’s early stages, Project Eagle staff generated questions for the Parent Café, but over time, the parents have taken the lead and formulated their own questions and chosen their own conversation topics, which give educators insights into what families are thinking and concerned about. In order to make best use of the opportunity to discuss these important issues with parents, Project Eagle partners with community members and organizations such as Girl Scouts, Healthy Communities Wyandotte, Children’s Mercy Hospital, and Reach Out and Read. Parents who take part report new and strengthened relationships with other parents, and center staff members believe the café has sparked and nurtured meaningful relationships between parents and the program staff. These new relationships provide parents with an increased sense of support from the center. Looking ahead, Project Eagle staff will gradually turn over the organization and management of the café to parents.
Library Cafés
Developing relationships through Library Cafés across the state, Maryland libraries bring families of young children together through family or library cafés. While children participate in play activities, librarians engage in conversations with parents that focus on lifelong learning and the excitement and challenges of raising young children. Parents support each other and share information that is useful for children’s learning and parents’ development. At the Carroll County Public Library (MD), for example, one group of Spanish-speaking parents shared that they learn English by reading books aloud to their children and adopting new words from them. Through these cafés, librarians also learn about what matters for families and ways that they can tailor services and collections to families’ needs and interests.
Parent Cafés for Parent Leaders
Strengthening Families Illinois (SFI) is a statewide relationship-based child-abuse and neglect-prevention initiative. Rather than implementing the project through program-to-parent learning, state and parent leaders opted to deliver the curriculum directly to parents through parent-to-parent cafés. Using the café approach, parent leaders facilitate small-group discussions among gatherings of parents, grandparents, and other caregivers in early childhood settings. After every three rounds of discussion, there is a large group debriefing, or “harvest,” which assists parents and caregivers in summarizing what they have learned. What makes the initiative successful is the café approach — parents lead, learn, and assist one another in a comfortable environment. These cafés have also been successful in supporting diversity because SFI organizes them in different languages and around different groups (such as teen mothers, fathers, and foster parents, among others). Early childhood staff help reach out to parents about the program and see firsthand the power and influence that parent-to-parent learning can have.⁷
Learn More
Café to Go! A Quick Reference Guide for Hosting World Café
Indiana World Café Conversation Report
Endnotes
¹Agger-Gupta, N., & Harris, B. (2015). Dialogic change and the practice of inclusive leadership. In: Breaking the zero-sum game: Transforming societies through inclusive leadership. Available at http://www.theworldcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Agger-Gupta-Harris_Inclusive-Leadership.pdf
²World Cafe Community Foundation (2015). Café to Go: A Quick Reference Guide for Hosting World Café. The World Café Community Foundation Creative Commons Attribution. Available at http://www.theworldcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Cafe-To-Go-Revised.pdf
³Jor’dan, J. R., Wolf, K. G., & Douglass, A. (2012). Strengthening families in Illinois: Increasing family engagement in early childhood programs. Young Children, 67(5), 18–23.
⁴Brown, J., & Isaacs, D. (2001). The World Café: Living knowledge through conversations that matter, The Systems Thinker, 12(5). Available at http://www.theworldcafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/STCoverStory.pdf
⁵Gill, L., Ramsey, P. L., Leberman, S., & Atkins, S. (2016). Using World Café to enhance relationship-building for the purpose of developing trust in emotional intelligence training environments, The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 14(2), 98–110. Available online at: https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/10616/ejbrm-volume14-issue2-article413-Using%20World%20Cafe%20for%20relationship-building%20%281%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
⁶Tener, B. (2014) The multi-dimensional benefits of a World Café. Available at http://www.ndcollaborative.com/wcbenefits/
⁷Jor’dan, J. R., Wolf, K. G., & Douglass, A. (2012).
