Community

The coffee community has been compared to a lot of things in my time. To many, it’s a cult (some of us perpetuate this opinion, looking at you Dark Arts); it's a silly middle class past time;  it's a bunch of weird nerds tinkering with ever more complicated plastic cones; or it’s the exclusive reason millennials can't get their hands on the property market, that and the avocados...we love an avocado.

However, having spent a lot of time in my life looking for a group to “fit in with” what I will say is that it's extremely welcoming once you’re in.  Because the end users are coffee shops and because those coffee shops are so often neighbourhood havens, there has always been a sense of community around it. I'm talking about the communities surrounding the coffee shops, not the industry. It has a direct effect on people's lives in a sort of catchment circle around each one. Many, if not all of the pals I speak to about moving to different areas cite that a good coffee shop and a good pub must be in walking distance or “I just couldn't live there.”

We all seem to find ourselves invested in efforts to better the places we work, either around the roastery, the coffee shops or even at origin level. There's bad bits, there always are, but from where I'm standing they are few and far between.It's a shared thread, generally, that efforts always head in the direction of “make shit better”

Community

“The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common”

Coffee is just the catalyst to bring people together so they can come up with amazing ideas or work to make stuff better, it's the fuel for the machine not the machine itself.  It should be the reason we do what we do. The industry should be being used to reach out to and engage with all the places beans are brewed, to ignore that feels like missing the point.

Okay this is all starting to sound like a McCafe advert. I will calm down, but the reason I'm writing this is because we (Coborn) are looking to move to a larger space, and with that has come the conversation around what we want from that space. yes, space itself is a big factor but it's gotta be more than that. What we settled on is that we need it to be somewhere where we can springboard other things from. The coffee must be roasted, that's a given, the coffee must be delicious and it must not oppress the people growing it, that's also a given but we are doing that already. We want somewhere that we can improve the lives of people around us, that doesn't have to be coffee related, building a space that allows people to come together and put their own events on is worthy enough.

What strikes me is that what used to be industrial parks which would have been no go areas for most people not long ago, places where warehouses churned out products in secret behind closed roller shutters, places that felt pretty hostile to the public and completely illogical to open up as a community has become just that. Breweries are now tap rooms, coffee roasteries open to walk ins, coffee shops, pizza places, and brandy distilleries built in ugly buildings and shipping containers have become meeting places for softball groups, makers communities and run clubs, the system works and it doesn't matter if the place is a bit shit, humans don't really care they adapt to the environment better than anything else on planet earth and deep down most of us are looking for like minded people. 

There has been a lot of talk of the death of this kind of stuff, of people feeling like they don't know their neighbours or that they don't really feel connected to the people who live within spitting distance of them. It's always mentioned as a negative thing and it's why keeping these havens alive is so important. It all comes from us, communities die without the people that make them and the places for those like minded strangers to find each other.

If you've read this far then thank you, we appreciate you and we are damn glad to have you along for the ride. We will always want to use the little platform we have to do awesome stuff with the people around us and hopefully a big old bunch of you feel the same.

Till next time

Big love, HAYDEN