Crossing the Generational Divide: Bringing Community Members of All Ages Together Through Crafts and Conversation

This project involves supporting a weekly event (called the MERA Café) to foster socialization between members of a rural community throughout the late fall, winter and early spring at a time of year when there are fewer events and less opportunities for community members to assemble and socialize. The Café runs on Saturdays and offers coffee and hot chocolate, along with baked goods for snacks and a warm lunch of soups or stews.

Last year, we embarked building an informal community cafe run by MERA members over the winter. We saw that our participants were otherwise isolated during the colder months and that maintaining this café was crucial for the local community and overall beneficial to MERA and its members. Also, we realized that the Saturday Café was a great opportunity to include a younger participants, encouraging creativity and allowing children to engage with materials and techniques in a relaxing environment.

Our objective for this year is to foster an environment that welcomes families. The means to accomplish this is to offer arts and crafts activities that would engage and entertain children. This is aligned with MERA’s core mission to bring arts activities to the community. At the same time, this will give their parents the chance to relax and socialize and equally importantly to allow the senior generation a chance to participate in the crafting activity as well and to engage with the kids.

If funding is obtained, it will allow for the hiring of a Craft Coordinator and Instructor to plan, prepare for and animate the craft activity each week to facilitate the community interaction outlined above. Funding would also allow MERA to offer refreshments and food at a nominal cost and help us engage kitchen support, which would facilitate the burden of preparing and serving the food and drink, and would likely encourage more community involvement by removing a cost barrier to participation.