Hi! My name is Félix. I am a 24 year old Belgian who worked at Café Utopia between October 2021 and July 2022 as part of my European Voluntary Service ( EVS).

What is Café Utopia ?

Café Utopia is a café located in the cosy town of Holstebro, on the west coast of Jutland, Denmark. More than a simple café, Utopia is a workplace for people who are psychologically vulnerable or have a mental illness. Developed by the Holstebro municipality, the social project aims to provide its employees with an increased quality of life through meaningful employment and access to psychological help while giving Holstebro residents and tourists yet-another quality café to enjoy !

My role at the project

My typical day at the project is separated between two main tasks : cooking in the kitchen and working in the café itself. I move from one to the other during the day depending on where I am needed the most.

In the kitchen, I use the café’s many recipes to prepare some of the items the cooks will need to dress plates (I bake various types of bread, make salsa and other salads, cakes, dressing, ganache, …). Otherwise, I help around whenever I am asked to (cleaning the kitchen or helping out the dishwashers) or distract the chefs with my Belgian Danish accent and funny stories.

In the café, I work as a waiter ! I welcome guests, answer the phone for reservations, take orders, prepare drinks and bring plates to the tables. I had some waiting experience from Belgium but obviously not in Danish ! Speaking the language everyday with customers has definitely helped me to learn it a lot faster. The café can host as much as a hundred people across its various rooms (café, terrasse, conference rooms, …) so it can get quite busy when the Danes decide to escape the rain to eat one of our delicious meals !

My solidarity project(s)

The Braille Menu

My first project idea was to make a Braille menu so that blind – or people with low sight – could come and enjoy the café. The idea came during a brainstorming activity in one of our AFS trainings where, living in Holstebro for some months, I had indeed noticed some blind people walking in the streets. We even had a semi-regular blind client at the café ! Social inclusion being one of the core values of Utopia, I thought the idea fitted the description of a good solidarity project quite well.

Despite liking the idea, my mentor and the chefs were quick to point out that the menu changed twice a year on average, and that my project would therefore only serve a handful of times at best. Nevertheless, I was determined to pursue the idea even if it would only have a limited impact.

However, after a couple weeks of research where I looked for help in the municipality and called various organisations like the Dansk Blind Samfund, I quickly realised that it would be much harder to complete than I initially thought. To put it shortly, none of the people or organisations I contacted seemed really motivated by the project or willing to help me out. To put it squarely, only one organisation offered to help me make the menu… on the condition that I travel all the way to Copenhagen to (maybe) use one of their specialised typewriters. Given the distance (approx. 350 km.), the cost of such a journey (which might need to be made more than once) and the overall impact all my efforts would have, I decided to drop the project altogether and find something else to work on.

Discover Utopia

My next idea emerged after two main observations :

• Due to the high number of employees (most workers at Utopia are employed as “flex jobers” with minimal weekly working hours, meaning more people are needed to fill out a week’s schedule) and the “focused” nature of a kitchen, I realised that many of my colleagues didn’t know much about each other. While this was certainly also due to the specific nature of the project (which is designed as a safe space where people are free to exchange with others as well as just show up and work in silence), it striked me as an area with potential improvements to be made.

• Like most café’s, I felt a big gap between the customers and the employees, the former rarely getting to interact with the person who dressed their plate, prepared their meal, arranged the flower bouquets on their table and vice-versa. Moreover, I realised that many customers didn’t know that the café was a social project when I mentioned it while waiting on their table. And partly for good reason, the project’s identity being more centred around highlighting the employee’s capacity to do quality work rather than on their illnesses or difficult life stories. However, I noticed that customers would get quite curious to know more about the people behind their meal once they found out, highlighting their overall positive experience at the café which could serve as positive feedback to the people backstage.

One thing I thought about in order to bridge some of the gaps I saw in those two observations was to do small interviews with the people working at the café and putting them on the internet for anyone to access. As such, I thought the interviews could serve both my colleagues, to give them a space for personal expression if they needed it and for their colleagues to get a better grasp of who they are, as well as giving a bit of insight to the customers on the café’s “backstage”.

Every interview is of course done with the full consent of the interviewee, some colleagues asking to just discuss together without any recording. All of the interviews are gathered on a Soundcloud page I created for the occasion. Some of them are quite short in order to be more digestible ! I expect to add some more in the future as I didn’t get to interview some of the most important people in the Café, namely Mette and Malene (the two very very very busy chefs) and Henriette (the project’s nurse). I also made some visuals to be displayed on the Café’s announcement screen so that guests could access my project easily (they’re quite blurry but the screen they’re going onto is huge and guests only look at it from far away) :

Overall my evaluation of my own project would be something like a 5/10 :C I didn’t really plan things in advance enough and procrastinated too much, which I don’t advise ! Other than that having little chats with some colleagues I usually don’t speak so much to was really nice and some of them even thanked me for thinking about this kind of opportunity for them to open up a bit.

Félix