Chatty Café Scheme

The Chatty Café Scheme was started in 2017 as initiative to encourage conversation among strangers. In particular, it involve cafés and other venues marking certain tables at which talking to strangers is explicitly welcome.
The scheme started in Britain, where "traditional reserve is said to make it almost impossible for the British to talk to strangers in public places". The founder of the initiative, Alexandra Louise Hoskyn, is a social worker in the Learning Disability and Autism team in Oldham, England.
United Kingdom
Implementation in the United Kingdom
The first Chatter & Natter table was set up in a café in Oldham in 2017. The scheme soon found support by Costa Coffee and Sainsbury’s, and was implemented in cafés across the country as well as in the United States.
The Oldham Borough Council discussed the scheme, noted that "libraries, leisure centres, and the local markets; health centres and hospitals run by the NHS; and pubs, cafes, shopping centres and retail parks run by business partners have potential to host such schemes", and resolved to ask the Chief Executive to offer, to the Chatty Café Scheme, the Council’s support once the Coronavirus measures will have been lifted. Further organizations supporting the scheme include Beefeater, Age UK, Mind, Campaign to End Loneliness, and Whitebread. Andy Street, mayor of the West Midlands county, has campaigned for coffee shops and other venues to participate in the scheme. MP David Lammy has named the scheme in his book Tribes, published 2020, and has referred to it as a original local initiative in terms of his proposed ‘encounter culture’ for encouraging "meaningful engagement between people of different ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and places on an equal basis".
Discovering that there was some hesitation to be the first at a table, the initiative created the role of an "ambassador" as a person to be present at a table a few hours a week. Additionally, the role of a "volunteer" was created, who visits various venues seeking feedback as to how the tables are going.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, the scheme was extended to include telephone and video calls to combat isolation, with volunteers being matched with a person wanting a call on a weekly basis.
The Chatty Café Scheme has joined the British government’s Tackling Loneliness Network, a group of high-profile charities.
Similar initiatives
In 2019, the BBC reported on "Happy to Chat" benches and on an initiative by the BBC and public transport companies encouraging people to talk to their fellow passengers.
Implementation abroad
In December 2019, Hoskyn presented the scheme in a TEDxKazimierzWomen event in Kraków, , Poland, and at the end of 2020, Chatter and Natter tables had been set up in Poland, Gibraltar, Australia and Canada. Given that the British expression "natter" is not used in Australia, the tables are referred to as "Have a Chat" tables.
Impact
The scheme has been cited in a book on ageing society as contributing to creating communities. In a report about the role of pubs in British communities, sociologist Thomas Thurnell-Read has credited the initiative as being inspirational to further initiatives such as the use of ‘Join Me’ cards in a pub in the Southeast of England, which customers can place onto their tables in order to indicate to other customers and to staff that they are open to having a conversation.
Awards
The scheme received a two-thousand-pound grant from the Royal Society and, in 2019, won the Innovating for Ageing competition created by the Just group and the International Longevity Centre, a think tank dedicated to the impact of longevity. Hoskyn has been awarded a daily Points of Light award by the British prime minister Boris Johnson for how the scheme is "transforming the culture of talking to other people in cafes, combating loneliness and opening up people’s lives". In 2021, Hoskyn was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for 2021.

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