Welcome to this month’s Chatty Café newsletter. We’re so pleased to share some heartening updates from across the network, including volunteer news, inspiring stories from our tables, upcoming campaigns and ways you can support our work to bring more people together through simple conversation.
- Our growing volunteer network
We’re delighted to share that we now have 824 volunteers in the Chatty Café network. Of these, 624 are already hosting tables every week, with many more currently coming through training. This is incredibly heartening as we continue working to ensure every Chatter & Natter table has a welcoming volunteer host.
We know that volunteers play a key role in helping people feel comfortable enough to come along, sit down and join in. Whether one person attends a table each week or ten people do, every conversation matters and every table can make a real difference.
Promoting tables locally can be challenging, so we’ve asked volunteers to send us photos and short videos explaining what they get from hosting and sharing feedback from their tables. We’ll bring these together into a collage to share in August, helping to show the impact of Chatty Café and inspire more people to get involved.
Our hope is to see Chatter & Natter tables in every town and city across the country. At a time when many people feel disconnected, welcoming tables in cafés can offer a simple but powerful way to bring communities together.
- A creative day at Shakespeare North
We had a fantastic Chatty Café graffiti session at Shakespeare North Playhouse this month. Their wonderful manager, Tom, organised for a talented graffiti artist to join the table, giving everyone the chance to get creative, try something new and enjoy plenty of conversation along the way.
Activities like this are a brilliant way to bring people together, spark new friendships and create a real sense of community. A huge thank you to Tom for arranging such an engaging experience, and to everyone who came along and joined in.
Sometimes all it takes is a chat, a cuppa and a little creativity to brighten someone’s day.
- Every Step Starts a Conversation
This October, our wonderful volunteer Jon, alongside his wife Sharon, will be walking the full 26.2-mile London Marathon route to raise funds for The Chatty Café Scheme.
Jon has been a Chatty Café volunteer for the past four years, and his Chatter & Natter table has brought hundreds of people together. He has also played an important role in helping the scheme grow and is heavily involved in our volunteer training.
Jon and Sharon’s fundraising goal is £1,500, which will help us:
- Train more volunteers
- Open more Chatter & Natter tables across the UK
- Provide resources for local groups
- Support our small national team so we can continue bringing people together
- Provide resources for local groups
Every penny raised will go back into growing the Chatty Café network and setting up more tables around the country. If you can donate or share the fundraising page, it would mean so much.
Every donation, every share and every word of encouragement helps us create more welcoming places where people can connect over a simple conversation. Together, we can help make sure fewer people experience loneliness.Thank you for your support.
