Get into a Group and Talk About the Future at the Consciousness Café

Open up and share your thoughts, feelings about ideas about burning topical issues

Debating about topical issues such as race, social inequality, and the state of education and healthcare is a favourite pastime for many politically and socially conscious South Africans. But we often don’t have a safe space in which we can discuss these, sometimes controversial, topics. The Consciousness Café is an event that seeks to be exactly that – a dynamic platform for talking about the challenges we face in South Africa. Want to have your say? Mark Saturday, 10 February in your calendar when this event takes place at The Bookery in the CBD.

Consciousness Café is a pop-up café, which invites people from all walks of life to come together to share their thoughts, reflect on their emotions, and tackle their discomforts while seeking to understand how it relates to social, economic and political challenges on a global level.

These pop-up conversations happen in four-hour sessions with between 20 and 25 people per group. A form of “transformation dialogue” is used to facilitate these sessions, a technique developed by the No-Name-Initiative as a way to work towards promoting social cohesion through understanding.

To start off, participants bring up their burning issues, and then the group makes a collective decision on which topics will be discussed. Thereafter, participants break into smaller groups where they are asked what the world would be like if their particular issue was not a problem.

Consciousness Café organisers try a different approach to solving a problem. They work from the back to the front, meaning they ask participants to imagine a world where their issue did not exist and then tackle how they would fix it, starting from scratch.

At the end, participants are also encouraged to share their goals and hopes for the future. After some time discussing their pertinent issues, participants are guided to express their thoughts and feelings with complete honesty.

TICKETS TO THE CONSCIOUSNESS CAFÉ POP-UP

Entry is free and the event takes place at The Bookery in Cape Town.

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Summer is about keeping busy and getting into the festive spirit by checking out Things You Have to do in Cape Town Before You Die, New Restaurants and Hot Spots in Cape Town and Things you must do on your summer holiday in Cape Town.

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