the L & K café

a virtual community born out of pandemic crisis

Laura and I had been meeting at Boston area cafés for weekly Monday morning brainstorms for over a month when the pandemic hit. We had first met a few years prior, when my nationwide timebanking work brought me in contact with her social capital community development work in Boston. We knew early on in that initial rendezvous that we saw the world through similar rose-colored glasses. When a house-sitting opportunity brought me back to Boston to start off 2020, I reached out to her. Soon after, we started our weekly meetings, intent on uncovering something that we could bring into the world together. The meetings consisted of caffeine, notebooks and Post-Its, existential quandaries, impossible ideas and conversations that seemed to defy the time-space continuum - we knew early on that we had something in collaborating together; the question was “what?” 

It was a Monday when the Lockdown restrictions went into place in Massachusetts. Laura and I had planned to meet that day, but the morning before, we woke up, decided to call an audible and shifted our meeting to Zoom. By the end of the day, I had crafted the message below and first thing on Monday morning, we posted it to our Facebook feeds. We figured that the space we were going to curate for ourselves could be beneficial for others as well, so why not open up the invitation. We had no idea if the algorithm would pick up our message; we had no idea if anyone would join us, but we figured in a period of unprecedented, undetermined uncertainty everyone could benefit from a receptive and reliable community space.

We were right. We held the space open for five hours that first day and had about 15 people join us from different aspects of our lives, and from all over the country and world. They came concerned, curious, excited, and ready to share, smile and connect. With nearly two decades of combined facilitation experience between us, we knew enough to set an agenda, established light ground rules and made sure that everyone had a chance to introduce themselves, as they joined us. That afternoon we hopped on a debrief call to process and reflect on the day; we realized that we might be onto something.

Thanks to the pandemic, I had just lost my upcoming job as the Program Director for a travel and education program in Southeast Asia, and needed something to keep me occupied and applied while trying to get my life back on track. Laura was on a bit of a professional sabbatical, teaching piano lessons, learning how to code and *spoiler alert* beginning a family with her husband. We both had the capacity and motivation to make a commitment to our idea, each other and the community we were about to unexpectedly create.

So, we opened the space again on Tuesday...and then on Thursday. By the end of the week, we had created a logo, begun calling it a virtual coworking café, and published our standing agenda. The next Monday, we promoted it to our networks again and, by the time we opened the café on the second Thursday, there were 20 people eagerly waiting for us (and another 80 added to the calendar invitation). We were overwhelmed. We had intuitively made something and didn’t know what to do with it.

It's important to note that what we conceived wasn't an original idea. While spending most of 2019 traveling solo throughout the hills, hollers and backroads of Appalachia and the rural South, many of my Wednesday afternoons were spent on a Do The Thing! virtual coworking call hosted by my friend, Sam. She had originally created it as an accountability space for her fellow Wellesley alumnae to stay connected to one another across different geographies and get tedious, bothersome tasks done thanks to a light meeting structure; when she opened up the opportunity for folks from our StartingBloc community to join, I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of a consistent, connected virtual community. Serendipitously, the housesitting gig that brought me to Cambridge (and gave me a place to hunker down, when lockdown set in and stranded the owners in Europe), came to me through someone I had met in Sam’s virtual space.

Making sense of a rapidly changing world

We’ll be the first to admit that we had no idea of who would respond to our invitation, especially since we left it so open-ended, and the world’s attention was drawn elsewhere. But our little community quickly made itself and its needs known to us.

In what seemed like a matter of days, the world had completely changed. The sudden idleness of society quickly manifested collective uncertainty. People who had never worked remotely before were confined to their homes with little structure and support to guide them. In an unprecedented moment of singularity, the world was facing the same professional and personal challenges; the people who showed up to our space were hoping to make sense of it all.

Luckily, I had spent the past handful of years cultivating a diverse and distributed global network of peers, and that was reflected in the people who curiously showed up to what we were creating. During the first couple weeks, we had people join us from India, Iraq, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Canada, with just as many US states represented in our virtual café. People were able to ask questions and find answers in the café, whether it was in distinctions between the pandemic response in New York City or Paris, Birmingham, Alabama or Erbil, Iraq. In a world without much clarity, we found mutual understanding that nothing about this experience was normal or even certain, but we could navigate it together. I think it offered everyone a sense of stability and relief, which is why they initially kept coming back.

Ironically, I had circumnavigated the globe and traversed the US to meet and connect with so many of these people, yet all it took was the world coming to a halt for us to find each other in the same place and time, online. We began to experiment more-and-more. Jess helped host one on West Coast hours. Hanna hosted one in London. Annika hosted a study group in Geneva. I think at our brief peak, we were running four cafés across four time zones on two continents for nearly 30 hours a week. I soon realized that this new virtual paradigm would break down countless geographic barriers to make us more globally connected and accessible to one another. It gave me a small reason for hope.

Finding belonging in a virtual community

Needless to say, our community changed and evolved as time passed and everyone began to understand their respective relationship with the rapidly evolving normal. Not everyone stuck around and some people never even joined, but everyone who engaged with what we were creating unanimously expressed to us how much they appreciated that our space existed and continued to do so. My guess is that it offered some semblance of everyday life as we all traditionally understood it. Similar to the purpose that the favorite local café serves in any connected neighborhood, we created a third space. With people stuck at home, but incapable of going to work, we created the in-between by holding space and creating a reality that allowed people to feel like they were somewhere else.

We really leaned into the embodiment of this café. We experimented with community events, like happy hours, game nights, a movie night and a virtual speed dating night; Laura hosted a laugh-filled version of the Newlywed Game for couples enduring quarantine together. The speed dating night even resulted in a real-world Bay Area intimate relationship for a couple friends that lasted through the summer. Ten of us watched Cats! The Movie together, and we only made it out of that viewing with our sanity thanks to the wine and impromptu support group we formed in the Zoom chat. We prototyped bulletin boards, where people could promote their work, share resources and respond to thought-provoking prompts. Our Zoom room was the community table, where everyone was welcome to bring their work. We would take breaks to spark up novel chats, have someone lead group stretches, co-color drawings (see below), play collaborative online games, sing terrible karaoke and even provide trouble-shooting support on pesky computer code and strategic design issues for members of our group.

We came to realize what worked - consistency and communication. We “opened” the café on time and with enthusiasm every day. We then welcomed everyone with a “Question of the Day” and, by allowing everyone to answer before moving on, we gave them a chance to arrive, to be seen and to be heard - to belong. I cannot stress enough how much that simple, consistent act mattered. We had cultivated and maintained a diverse and unique group of people across profession, age, gender, race and geography; having everyone reflect and respond together day-in-and-day-out cultivated a shared identity rooted in collective vulnerability and authenticity, which superseded any difference members of our group held in that space we created together.

We ensured that people could show up as they were, and be celebrated in doing so. For example, some people were louder or more assertive than others, but instead of singling them out, being critical of them, or trying to make them conform, Laura and I leaned on our facilitation skills to either provide more group structure or offer those people more responsibility in the café. A culture of radical acceptance became the norm rather than the exception; that collective belonging gave our community life and let us know it served a very significant purpose.

Whether someone was a working mother, overworked, unemployed and trying to find work, an entrepreneur going through a pivot, a traveler living alone in solitude or one stranded in a foreign country, everyone could show up with the expectation of non-judgement and inclusion for whatever they were going through and however they were feeling that day; that is exactly what so many of us needed as the lockdown extended beyond our expectations and imaginations.

Unjust loss, new life and the space in between

When George Floyd was murdered, while the world sat stuck in front of screens bearing witness, our café had been open for about two and a half months. By then we had effectively built a community based on trust, openness and understanding, or at least that’s what we realized when our café became a space for processing the moment of racial reckoning our society found itself in. All of those values, norms and behaviors we had been encouraging and reinforcing allowed us to have sensitive conversations and even just sit in supportive silence together. In the space between struggling alone and being called to collective action, we held a space to process. As we had always somewhat wondered what we were building the café for, we came to realize that this was much of it. We had created a healthy and inclusive digital third space, existing somewhere in between the inescapable constraints of our homes and the overwhelming anxieties of a global society in turmoil; we had created somewhere that people could show up as themselves to make sense of the world together.

By the end of June, Laura and I were exhausted. She was starting a new and exciting job with the City of Boston, and I had about $29 in my bank account and needed to refocus on getting my professional life back on track. At some point we had created a “tip jar” and begun asking for coffee-sized donations from café members, resulting in a couple handfuls of contributions. We weren’t discouraged by it. We hadn’t launched it and committed hundreds of hours to it by that point in a scheme to get paid. We had thought about creating a viable business out of it - filling out a business model canvas and having exploratory chats with established entrepreneurial peers - but every angle we considered felt like it would compromise what made our creation unique and genuine. There were rapidly scaling peers in the space, like Cave Day, that quickly filled that niche as well.

So, we set Tuesday, June 30th as the final day our café would be open. We sent out the notification to our mailing list and invited everyone to stop by one last time. And, unbeknownst to Laura, I sent out an additional email announcing that the final day would also be a surprise baby shower for her. (Yes, complete with a Name The Baby photo matching game shown below.) For the shower, I set the goal of raising $300 to purchase a bundle of diapers for the baby and a spa day for her.

We raised the money, which Laura then went on to donate to the National Birth Equity Collaborative and Black Mammas Matter Alliance, national organizations that address maternal health inequities for Black women and birthing people. It was a response to the Black Lives Matter moment, and an affirming reminder that the space we had created had the potential to create a greater impact on the world.

What happened stays, what we learned leaves

On the first Monday of 2021, as the cold weather and corresponding winter pandemic spike brought the country to a halt again, we opened The L&K Café for a second season. This time we decided to take a co-operative approach, engaging the 15 or so regulars we had during lockdown to co-host and lead the café with us. The effort only lasted about a month, with varying levels of ownership, enthusiasm and engagement. Unable to recapture the magic we had created during the lockdown, we closed the café for good by the end of February, realizing that the impermanence of the café was one of the things that made it so special in the process. During three months of unprecedented uncertainty, it was a constant in our lives that offered a sense of stability, connection and belonging; one of the few places that allowed us to feel human during a period in time where so much of the world reinforced that it wasn’t possible.