How to Host a Menopause Café

We think talking about the menopause over a cup of tea is a great way to spend some time. If you agree, why not host your own Menopause Cafe? It’s inexpensive, simple and fun.

A Menopause Café is a discussion with no preset agenda, where the topics are chosen by the participants on the day. So an information event, or a guest speaker, or promoting a particular treatment or product is not a Menopause Café. These can be useful events, but please don’t label them as Menopause Cafes.  You could, for example, hold an information talk first, followed by a Menopause Cafe.

Please note: Menopause Cafes are open to anybody to attend! We want the whole world talking about the menopause so that includes men and women and inbetween, all genders and all ages.

For inspiration, have a look at Elizabeth’s experience in “What I learnt from holding a Menopause Cafe”.

Menopause Café Guide

What a Menopause Café™ is:

A discussion group. We don’t set agendas – discussion topics emerge and are shaped by participants.

  • Open to everyone. The menopause impacts everyone and all are welcome at a Café. This includes all ages and genders.
  • Impartial to the way ahead. Everyone’s menopause is a unique, so our Cafes are supportive spaces to help people to learn, to make sense of their own journey or to consider options. They never promote a particular product or course of action.
  • Not for profit. Cafes are not about selling things, they are about participants supporting each other. We don’t charge people to come and have a chat.
  • Accessible, respectful and confidential space: online or in person. All journeys and related choices are different –we listen to each other with curiosity, aiming to understand not necessarily to agree.

We also like to have tea, cake and fruit too! But that’s really up to you!

Keeping to these principles helps to ensure that Menopause Cafes remain
inclusive and empowering.

Sometimes hosts like to run other events before or after a café. Generally, these are information events like talks by guest speakers, related to the menopause. These would be labelled as separate events from the Café, so people could join just for the café, or just for the talk or both. Even after an information event, the Café still does not have a pre-set agenda and isn’t questions aimed at an expert. The café discussion emerges from the participants talking in small groups.

What a Menopause Café isn’t:

  • A support group, only open to perimenopausal or menopausal people.
  • An information event or talk
  • About doing community engagement, research or consultation – look back
    to our pure and simple principles.

If you are keen to host a Menopause Café, please read on. If you follow our principles and sign our Working Agreement then you may:

  • Use the name Menopause Cafe for your events.
  • Post your events on our website using the registration link.
  • Talk to the press and others as a volunteer host for Menopause Cafe

You don’t need to know anything about menopause, but it is useful if you know something about facilitating groups, publicising events, and also if you have a friend to help you.

Acknowledgements

This guide is based on the Death Café Guide www.deathcafe.com, with thanks to
Jon Underwood for letting us adapt his Death Café model. Thanks also to Nicola
Morrill and Carol Wheadon for providing suggestions for this revision.

Rachel Weiss
November 2022