What one does Marine David designed a social coffee place that combines a coffee shop with workshops and a thrift store to create a learning and sharing community. This vision is how she wants to concurrently mitigate loneliness and slow down fast fashion. She created a place where people can meet, give and follow workshops, organize meetings and parties, and buy second-hand items, all while engaging in intergenerational inclusion and dialogue. Overall, she wants to contribute to the development of a more social, inclusive, and circular economy. The social coffee place weaves together a variety of activities that are all interrelated. For example, elderly people teaching young people “forgotten” crafts, like repairing clothes, enables the thrift store to sell beautiful repaired garments, which contributes to a circular economy and social cohesion in neighborhoods. Likewise, elderly people who look after young children, share stories from the past, and provide tutoring for students can help children with learning disabilities participate in school. The activities occurring in the Social Coffee Place depend on the visitors; the local residents’ needs; and other initiatives and institutions, such as schools, shops, music, and dance schools. Each Social Coffee Place, weaving together its own activities and people, is partly designed and partly emerges from people’s initiatives and the local context. These shops are run by the community and supported by two professionals who coordinate and interlink the different activities, ensuring the project’s impact reaches its full potential. Multiple activities Each activity intertwines with several other activities, which results in a patchwork of activities that intentionally or unintentionally reinforce each other and the multiple purposes of the organization. Everyone is invited to contribute in any way he or she wants. Sometimes, a person is a customer, other times, that person is the supplier, and often, he or she is both at the same time. The social coffee place puts prosumption and prosumers (Lenstra and Spaas 2017) into action by recognizing everyone as a person with intertwined needs, talents, and skills meeting other people with 10
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