Cafés provide an informal, safe, and inviting atmosphere to engage families, build community, and learn together. With planning and intent, cafés can deepen personal connections, provide voice and understanding around issues that matter, and cultivate leadership.
The content below will help inform decisions about the café experience you want to provide, from planning and design to outreach materials and evaluations.
Types of Cafés
Community Cafés are facilitated by people participants have established trust with and are dedicated to building on the assets of their community to strengthen families. This model uses self-reflection and peer-to-peer learning to help strengthen families or communities.
- The Community Café collaborative page is where you can explore free resources to inform your plan, communicate with others about your café, and get inspiration. You can also share your own resources, questions, harvests, and learning with others.
- The Strengthening Families framework is a research-informed approach focusing on the Protective Factors.
- Be Strong Families’ Parent Café(TM) model is also focused on the Protective Factors. Their fee-based training model provides leaders with technical assistance, training, process guides, and prepared question decks relevant to all families. Additional question decks are available for specific populations, including special education, parenting teenagers, youth cafés, recovery, grief, and loss.
World Cafés have a structured process where individuals travel from table to table in rounds followed by a larger group discussion. Although pre-defined questions are chosen initially, the World Café method is designed to gather information, generate ideas, and identify solutions. Therefore, intended outcomes or solutions are not determined in advance.
When children are provided the space to think about what the Protective factors mean for themselves and others, they develop agency – in their own lives, their families, and their community.
This guide will help get you started in building a meaningful Cafe experience for kids!
Creating a Welcoming Space
The Café model can be used with a specific population or intentionally bring groups of people together to build trust and break down barriers. Some audiences to consider include:
- Families of children in particular age ranges
- Dads or male caregivers
- Kinship caregivers
- Families who have members with disabilities
- Families who identify with a specific culture, background, or speak a language other than English
- Families in recovery
- Teen cafés
- Kids cafés (specific age groups)
- Educators and families
- First responders and families
- Key decision-makers and families
Offering a series of cafés supports building trust, connections, and your audiences. Consider seasonal cafes to keep conversations fresh and relevant. The materials below can be used to help your planning team construct a meaningful cafe experience:
Choose a café theme that gets people excited about attending and develop questions that will help people find common ground as they learn together. Your team may choose to create your own questions or research pre-packaged discussion cards.
Here are some resources to help get you started:
Here are some tips for setting up your physical space:
- Consider hosting your cafe in a neutral space, such as a public library or community room, and a time of day that works for your attendees. For example, is there a natural connection time with families, such as drop-off/pick-up times?
- Create a welcoming atmosphere by playing music and providing refreshments.
- Have plenty of table hosts on hand to greet and orient each guest and build a sense of comfort.
- Boost focus and relieve stress by providing a handful of quiet fidget toys and doodling materials on each table.
- Place large chart paper and colored pencils in the middle of each table for participants to doodle or jot down ideas and emphasize points while hearing what others have to say.
Whatever you call them, setting expectations for conversations is essential to ensuring a safe space for dialogue and connection. This document has some agreements that are frequently used in all kinds of cafés.
Café s get better and better each time you host one. So, at the close of each café, gather feedback to inform the next one and identify what was valuable for families and what adjustments might be needed. Below are some sample evaluations forms to get you thinking about the information you might want from café attendees.
Sample Evaluation Form English
Facilitators & Table Hosts
Facilitators create safety, manage transitions, build the energy in the room and support all participants. They also connect the dots around the intent of the café by reflecting on and reinforcing the group’s collective growth and knowledge. These resources are helpful to get your facilitators ready!
Table conversations are a central element of the cafe that allows participants to explore questions that matter. Table hosts encourage participants to dig deeper, share their reflections while following café agreements, and connect ideas and experiences as they emerge. Use these materials to help your table hosts prepare:
Communications Toolkit
To create this Café Communications Toolkit, we spoke with NH Families who have attended cafés around the state. We asked them how they heard about cafés, their hesitations before attending, what they liked best about the experience, and what they thought other families might want to know. The flyers and social media posts below can be edited to meet your organization’s needs and the needs of the families you would like to engage. If you have any questions about these materials, please email rdealmeida@PICnh.org.
Each of these images is sized to be used on Facebook or Instagram. Below there are images with and without text embedded. If you plan to boost your Café content on Facebook, you’ll want to use the images without text. We chose images that represented diverse family perspectives so that organizations can use images that resonate with their particular audiences.
Click on an image below. When it opens, right click and select “copy image” then paste into the program you use to save social media images. Images with and without text are sized for Facebook and Instagram. Those with text can be used for posts that are not boosted or used as ads. Those without text are ideal for posts you plan to boost or use as ads.
Fathers without text
Mom and children 1 without text
Mom and children2 without text
Additional Resources
- Cafe to Go
- Wiser Together
- Guide to Forming a Community Cafe Leadership Team (14p)
- The Community Cafe Orientation Guide: Changing the Lives of Children through Conversations that Matter (83p)
- CA Project Launch Cafe Conversations Downloadable Resources
- Children’s Trust Fund Alliance
- Be Strong Family Parent Cafes
The Parent Information Center designs and facilitates Cafés for groups and organizations throughout the state. We customize each experience to establish trust, build deeper connections, and greater understanding where families, providers, and community members can grow and learn together. If you would like to learn more about this service, please submit the form below or email info@picnh.org.