Welcome to the Wellbeing Cafe!

Welcome to the Wellbeing Café: a space in which community takes priority, and which you can shape at any point in time — to any extent.

We want this to be the opposite of your everyday experience; a rejection of the increasingly individualized and competitive nature of our society and student experience.

What you’ll find is a communal space in your Students’ Union with a pay-as-you-feel meal, and a proactive focus on your wellbeing.

It attempts to tackle a number of problems which face students: mental ill-health among students is demonstrably on the rise, and social isolation is an ever-present feature of student life. On top of all that, climate change is manifesting itself now and accelerating into the future and food poverty is a growing cause for concern.

The food served will have otherwise been wasted, collected and cooked for you by students in collaboration with Foodhall and served on a pay-as-you-feel basis. This means if you can’t afford to pay for your meal you don’t have to — but if you can you could cover the cost of someone else’s meal if you want to.

We see food waste, isolation and mental ill-health as intimately linked, with increasingly individualised forms of eating meaning that sharing of leftovers and sharing of daily experiences are both neglected. Having a meal in a communal space with the meal provided in communal fashion is a way of proactively aiming to foster a sense of belonging among users of the space.

A sense of ownership is also a large part of the focus on wellbeing. While this project has been started by 2 of your SU officers, a student working group has been involved from early on in organising the first café, and volunteers from this group will help organise the café on the day. We want the Wellbeing Café to be taken over by the working group in the future.

If you don’t want to be part of the working group but want to use the space then we still care about your views — it’ll be heavily feedback focused as it develops over time. We want the space to reflect what those who derive value from it want, rather than purely the vision of the organisers. We want to improve wellbeing by giving users ownership and agency over a space which benefits them and others.

If you don’t want to eat then that’s OK too — this can still be a space for you. There’ll be arts and crafts, mindfulness drawings and other activities to do on your own or engage with others over.

The other exciting thing about the is that it is an environmental protest at a food system which is premised on mass amounts of waste. One of the least talked about effects of climate change will be a global food shortage. The production of food creates huge amounts of CO2 and to waste in the face of this is incredibly problematic. We protest this by taking users of the space out of this waste-based food system meal by meal.

The food served will be vegan/vegetarian/halal/gluten/kosher friendly — as inclusive as possible — and there’ll be a number of dishes to choose from.

The long-term vision for this is to have a permanent communal, user-led and iterative space in the Students’ Union. To start with, there will be 3 trial events in October, November and December — with it becoming a weekly event from January.

Come along to the first Wellbeing Café on the 10th October at 6pm in Inox Dine.

Like the Facebook page => https://www.facebook.com/wbcafesheffieldsu/?fref=ts

Join the Working Group =>https://www.facebook.com/groups/305232543167980/