Hosting a Green Coffee Morning

May 21, 2008 – 3:01 pm

Sometimes we look around us and think well I’m doing my bit, but what are others doing?  Is there more that I could be doing? and how can I find out about it?  Who can I share my ideas with and who will share their ideas with me?

One thing you could do would be to host a green coffee morning.  Having just done this myself I’d definately recommend it.  It gives you the chance to get together with like minded people who may have experience of different things to you, and with whom you can share information.  It can be a good way of finding out about new things - or even old things that you might have missed.  Even if none of you have any real expertise it’s still worth while doing as you can think of things you’d all like to know more about and put your heads together to each find something out to share with the group for example.

If you’ve never organised anything like this before it can be a bit daunting to begin with, but it can be as complex or as simple as you choose to make it and the more experience you gain the easier this sort of thing become, believe me.  Maybe grab a friend and organise one between you if you think going it alone would be too hard.

I chose to host my coffee morning at my own home being lucky enough to have a reasonable amount of space so I could do this.  It also saved on the cost of hiring a hall so I didn’t need to ask people who came along to pay anything for the privilage.  I advertised it on various forums on the internet and on our local freecycle cafe site too.  I also put a poster and leaflets in SUST (our local fair trade and ecologically friendly store in town).  You could advertise in similar places or even in your local paper, or on your local radio.

I settled on a very relaxed open chat for my event, but you could make it more formal with a speaker or something if you wanted to, however if you do this it is worth making a note of how much a speaker might charge and how you’re going to re-coop the costs or if you’re going to foot the bill.  I also decided to try for goodie bags to give my guests, and to do this I contacted various companies and websites who sell environmentally friendly products, told them what I was trying to achieve, and asked if they could help me.  Not all of them were willing or able as some are very small and just can’t afford to do this, but a few were kind enough to send me out some things to include and so I was able to offer people a bag (paper of course!) with some cleaning products, body products and personal hygine products in it to take away with them and try later on.

We had nine of us at my event and I’d say that was a pretty good number to be honest, it was enough to get two or three conversations going, but not too many so you couldn’t hear what was going on. 

If anyone reading this would like any more ideas or info on setting something like this up, I’d love to hear from you.  Ditto if you’ve already done something similar, it would be great to hear your experiences.