People all across the country have a chat over a cup of coffee or tea every day. As a Time to Change Champion, if you can help people feel relaxed and comfortable; it’s likely that they will be in the mood for talking, and listening!

Take a look at our e-learning module for full details of how to run this activity.

 

Planning and preparing your activity

Where will you do it?

At home, in your place of work or education, or in a public location such as a community centre or village hall

 

Promoting your activity

If you are running a coffee morning in a place of work or education or your home, you could make posters and put them up in relevant places. You could also email people to promote the event.

If you are doing the event in a community location, you could put up posters, send invitations to the people you would like to attend (these could be physical invites, or done through your social media channels). Having an idea of the number of people likely to come will help with your preparations.

It’s important to invite people who are not already interested in mental health and you might not want to mention that this is a mental health event so that you can introduce mental health to people who don't know as much about it.

 

Cost

The biggest cost would be for a venue, if you choose one with a hire fee. Doing a coffee morning at home, or asking for free use of space for a good cause would reduce costs significantly.

You could borrowing equipment from friends and family or ask them if they can donate a small amount of tea, coffee and maybe bake a few cakes.

 

Materials you may need

Tables, tablecloths, chairs, cups, plates, cake stands, kettles/water boilers. You can print your own Time to Change materials here.

 

On the day

You will need to prepare, so give yourself plenty of time. You and your team will need to set up everything for making drinks, such as teabags, coffee, milk, sugar, cups etc. If you are serving cakes and/or biscuits, leave displaying them as one of the last tasks – you will also need plates, napkins and maybe a cake stand, if you have one.

You will need people to greet guests, serve them and, once people are settled, talk to them. You could also find conversation starters in our asset library, which you could use to help people start talking to each other.  However the most important thing is that you and other Champions share some of your experience of mental health problems, either by standing up and talking about why you're running the event, or in individual conversations.

After the event, you will need to clear up – using paper plates could save on some of the washing up!