Community cafes: what our first meetup taught us
Our first community meetup taught us more than six months of planning. Here's what worked, what didn't, and what we're doing differently next time.
A room that didn't feel like a service
We held our first in-person meetup in a community cafe on a Saturday. No lanyards. No clipboards. No "please sign in here" desk.
Thirty people came. Most of them stayed for three hours.
What we got wrong
We planned too much. We had icebreakers, a schedule, a Q&A. Nobody wanted any of it. They wanted to talk to each other.
What we got right
Food. Good food. The kind you'd actually choose to eat, not the catering-standard sandwich tray.
Space. We left long gaps with nothing planned, and that's where the real conversations happened.
What people told us afterwards
"It didn't feel like I was being helped. It felt like I belonged."
That's the bar we're holding ourselves to from now on.