Cafe 1759

Our Café 1759 is located in Whitehill & Bordon, in the heart of Quebec Park development. It’s part of the Whitehill & Bordon Healthy New Towns Programme, one of ten NHS demonstrator sites in the country. This has brought public sector, private sector and voluntary organisations together to transform Whitehill & Bordon into a town where it is easy for people to live healthy, active and independent lives and have the care they need in the right place and at the right time.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, using our established suppliers to source packing machinery and packaging materials, we were able to quickly position ourselves to support local schools with nutritious meals for local children. Our volunteers prepared and delivered 2,163 kids hot meals to vulnerable children at three local primary schools and one pre-school between April – July 2020.

Café 1759’s rolling apprenticeship scheme provides employment opportunities to local residents. In May 2020, our apprentice passed her final exam with Distinction, enabling her to move on to a Level 3 course with another local employer. Meanwhile, our permanent team member also passed his final exam with Distinction.

Opening the café doors whenever Government instructions permitted proved a big hit with local residents desperate for relief from staying indoors. Often braving wintery conditions to just to collect a coffee and a slice of morale boosting cake.

Rigorous enforcement of government guidance for opening enabled Café 1759 to host some much-needed community support when conditions allowed. During these brief periods the café:

• hosted six sessions from the Artscape project helping anyone at greater risk of mental health issues due to Covid-19;
• held events to help shape the Community Travel Plan;
• volunteers returned for brief spells, enabling us to reinforce the support we give them through brief spells of “business as normal”;
• hosted four meetings of the veterans breakfast club;
• participated in the Governments Eat Out to Help Out Scheme, giving local residents an ideal opportunity to enjoy community company and our café at half the normal cost;
• held meetings of the Sunflower Café, which supports people caring for those with dementia; and,
• held popular ceramics painting sessions for young people.

In December the café brought some cheer to the Homestart Group by hosting their Christmas get together:

The café team used lockdown to examine ways of decreasing the waste we send to landfill. In November 2020, we began saving our eggshells for a local chicken keeper to use as a food supplement for chickens. Our weekly output of approximately 360 eggshells, baked and crushed, provide an excellent source of calcium. All our coffee grounds (approximately 10kg per week) are saved and collected by local gardeners for compost. And all our cardboard is recycled, and bottles taken to local bottle banks.

By taking part in a scheme to collect surplus supermarket stock we were able to support our friends in the Bordon Food Bank who experienced an unpredicted growth in their client base – from seven families before the pandemic to over 70. It also helped us bring smiles and cheers to over 60 residents in two independent living schemes with donations of dozens of bunches of flowers.

In February 2021, thanks to £1,710 funding from the East Hampshire District Council’s Sheilding Residents Fund, the café began an eight-week weekly hot meal service to the residents of Shaftesbury Court independent living scheme, many of whom had no contact with anyone from the outside world for months.