The services Milk Cafe provide to women, refugees and asylum seekers include a social space, a peer support service, Child legal Clinic, employment housing and civil support. There are also art and craft activities and of course food related activities. Food is the link that brings everyone together and is always at the heart of the space. The local area is extremely diverse and historically has been the first locale for New Scots. These New Scots bring with them a rich heritage of food culture and sharing this is encouraged. Many food cultures are shared amongst the service users and we were told that this is the key to building resilient cohesive communities. Encouraging community members from diverse backgrounds add such value to social inclusion through food.

It was interesting to hear that they moved to a fully staffed catering service. Milk Cafe now fully match funds its services through he Catering service so that one service feeds the other. We operate a donations based food provision that is fully funded separately. We have discussed offering catering services in the past (to 3rd sector partners predominantly) and the learning is to do this with dedicated paid staff, and allow the volunteers to continue to flourish on the community setting.

Learning Outcomes

• Gain practical understanding of how a women-led community café and meal service is organised and delivered, including approaches to catering, volunteer involvement, and creating a welcoming environment for diverse groups such as refugees and asylum seekers.
• Develop insight into how community cafés can be used as safe and supportive spaces for women, refugees, and asylum seekers, and explore ways of addressing social isolation, building confidence, and fostering inclusion through food and shared activities.
• Explore how catering and community café models can be made sustainable, including approaches to funding, partnership working, and program design, and identify ideas that can be adapted to strengthen our own community meals and café development

"It was extremely interesting to see how our volunteers in particular responded to the challenges faced by Milk cafe, how they assessed and linked up the similarities between their activities and Milk Cafes despite both projects presenting differently. The similar themes were: Inclusion, Isolated Communities, Vulnerable individuals, Facing difficult situations."