We have been working with a group of community cafes to look at self-evaluation. Together they have developed a list of community cafe outcomes to reflect the range of differences cafes can make for their customers, volunteers and community members. We shared these with workshop delegates at ‘Sharing Patter’, our annual networking conference in November 2017,  who confirmed these outcomes reflected the sense and reality of work across the sector.

The outcomes reflect that every community café operates differently ( e.g. why they were set up, when they are open, how they are staffed and financed), but draw out the most common themes.

We collated some notes from our sessions with the group on Evaluating impact to help remind them about self-evaluation topics we discussed. The notes also includes links to other resources. Both these items may be useful for other community cafes or those planning to run one:

• If you are developing and planning your community café these materials may help you consider self-evaluation and which outcomes are most important to you, both as you start out and as you develop.
• If you are already running a café, the materials may be of interest: while your outcomes may be differently worded from those in the notes, they may reflect similar aspects to  yours. Or you may have other, very specific outcomes, based on additional or special aspects to your activities e.g. if you  a community growing aspect