What are Community Cafes?​

 

Community Stakeholders and parent leaders facilitate conversations based on the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework and appreciative inquiry that build community strengths, support parent leadership, and promote children's healthy development. Our goal is to promote Community Cafes as a method to advance family engagement and communication across systems at the community level. The hope is to increase reciprocity within these relationships, infusing systemic learning with parent and caregiver perspectives, thereby building communities' capacity for action that strengthens families.

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Protective Factors

• Parental Resilience

• Social Connections

• Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development

• Concrete Support in Time of Need

• Nurturing and Attachment / Social and Emotional Competence of Children 

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How Do The Cafes Work?

Community Cafes are a series of guided conversations using the World Cafe model. Participants use carefully structured questions to guide meaningful conversations, allowing individuals from diverse cultural, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds to engage in discussions that increase community wisdom, build parent voice, and facilitate action to improve the lives of children. 

Each Cafe produces a Harvest, which is a report that captures the discussion and serves as a tool to facilitate communication within and between communities. By collecting and synthesizing Cafe Harvests, community level perspectives, concerns, and goals can be shared with state leaders to infuse policy that affect families with authentic community voice. 

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Learn more about Community Cafes here. 

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Community Cafe Objectives

• Enhance community based organizations' capacity to support Parent Leaders in hosting Community Cafes

• Identify and strengthen community supports that engage and protect families

• Build parents' capacity to care for their families

• Build community capacity to create action plans that address challenges affecting the social and emotional wellbeing of children and families ​

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For more information, contact NYSPEP's Outreach Coordinator, Logan Coggins, at LEC258@cornell.edu.

Community Cafes were formally adopted by the NYSPEP Steering Committee in May 2013.

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