With the digital world erasing more and more opportunities for face-to-face interaction, loneliness and isolation are on the rise. Researchers have sounded the alarm over risks they pose to our health. Now, a simple but brilliant idea developed in the UK offers a solution. Abi Murray, operations manager of the not-for-profit Chatty Café Scheme, explains.
‘The idea started in 2017 when our founder, a lady called Alex, had just had a baby. She was a new mum experiencing loneliness for the first time. She was walking around and going into cafes and she noticed that there’d often be people just sat on their own,’ explains Murray. ‘And she thought, wouldn’t it be incredible if places like cafes could be used to facilitate people getting together? And that really started the idea of what we call a Chatter and Natter table.’
The concept is simple: a cafe designates a table and then people can sit at that table to talk to others. ‘And it was really just saying to the public, this is a space where if people want to chat, they can.’
Before taking time off to have children, Alex had been a social worker. She’d noticed that one of the biggest problems for the people she was supporting was isolation and loneliness. She approached a few cafés and asked them if they’d be open to trialing her idea. ‘Some cafés just ran with it and found it worked well,’ says Murray.
In 2019, Alex registered the Chatty Café scheme as a non-profit organization and applied for funding to push the idea. ‘And then during COVID all the hospitality venues shut down. So we created online Chatty Cafe groups that we still run, which are amazing for people who struggle to get out of the house. And we also set up a telephone friendship service.’
The Chatty Café scheme now has a national program training volunteers to make calls, help run the online groups, or to host the Chatter and Natter tables. ‘It became apparent very quickly that you absolutely need a volunteer there to welcome people,’ says Murray. ‘The volunteer shows up every week for 12 weeks and after that, quite often, the group will start to run itself.’
The scheme now works with some 700 hospitality venues and even has a partnership with Costa Coffee. People have spent Christmas together, friendships have been forged and there has even been a wedding!
‘The government is starting to realize more funding does need to go into initiatives that connect people and have other benefits like increasing community cohesion,’ Murray says. ‘All these things have positive impacts on physical and mental health.’
