Community Cafe Consultations

Well London is a £9 million Big Lottery funded project to work with local people to transform their health.

The programme will deliver projects in twenty of the most deprived communities in London. Key to the programme is the involvement of the communities in the design, development and delivery of the projects.

Uscreates worked with the University of East London to design and deliver the consultation process. The process used the World Café model of holding Community Café Consultations. These ‘pop up’ cafes travel to each community and provide an informal atmosphere for local people to communicate their health wants and needs.

Café engagement
Uscreates designed and produced a touring interactive exhibition that housed the Community Café Consultation in each community.

The exhibition showed aspirational material to inspire participants and had interactive elements allowing comments and views to be expressed in a range of ways.

In addition, the exhibition created a relaxed, informal, café style atmosphere in host venues, such as community centres, church halls and schools, by using bright colours and referencing café style environments.

Marketing
Uscreates developed methods to ensure a wide range of community representatives would attend and communicate their views.

Outcomes

Marketing Activities:
- Consultation materials to identify the individual needs of each community
- Delivery of a marketing workshop for Community Representatives and partners
- 10 individual Marketing Action Plans developed with Community Representatives
- Printed communication materials
- Delivery of marketing events specific to each community in conjunction with Arts Council England.

Café Engagement:
- Show casing aspirational material and partners projects
- Interactive magnetic black boards to capture thoughts and views
- Film screenings of partner’s projects
- The first use of Groundwork’s GIS interactive mapping tool
- Scribe tablecloths to record conversations

Over 300 community representatives consulted at cafes

The first phase of consultation was completed in November 07. The second phase is due to commence in February 08. Find out more about the Community Cafe consultations on the project blog.