Nice 'present' for Café Cadeau

Integration café helps new Danes feel at home.

”It’s innovative, it serves the church’s purpose, and there is a potential to develop the idea elsewhere.” This is why the integration work of Café Cadeau is the winner of the 2011 Christian Daily Initiative Award, said  the jury.

 

”Thank you”, ”Fantastic” and ”That’s lovely” were the responses in both English and Danish when the enthusiastic souls behind the integration Café Cadeau in Frederiksberg were told of the award. It also brought them flowers, a diploma, and a cheque for 10,000 DKK (€1,200).

 

Present to receive these were the day-to-day leader of the Churches’ Integration Service and the café’s innovator, Hans Henrik Lund, and Elisabeth Krarup de Medeiros, the integration consultant and project leader. The café also offers health checks and legal advice to new Danes over a cup of coffee, and serves as a drop-in centre where customers pop in from the street and are helped by volunteers.

 

”This is a great recognition, both from the readers and the jury,” says Elisabeth Krarup de Medeiros. “We’re very happy with the way the project’s going, but it’s also nice to receive recognition. We hope that people get to hear about us more and more,” she adds, referring to the readers’ votes on the internet that also made Café Cadeau the winner of the competition.

 

Hans Henrik Lund says, “We hope that the café can help others get started in this, their new country. We ourselves have some ideas for starting up drop-in centres at several other places around and about.”

 

The café opened in November 2010 and is visited each month by 600 or so guests, while 65 volunteers from 16 different nationalities run the centre. When the initiative began, there were only three volunteers, one of whom was Joy Larsen Okoye from South Africa. She has lived in Denmark for 17 years and has worked as a kitchen leader in several places. She quit her job in order to run the kitchen at Café Cadeau. She says:

 

”I think voluntary work is rewarding. I’m amazed that you get paid in Denmark for singing in a church choir! People here can’t understand that I work for free!”

 

The award money will be spent on among other things a summer party in appreciation of the volunteers’ efforts. On the wish-list there is also a computer, so that people in the café can get help filling out forms via the internet – for example to the local council.

 

Even though financially the volunteers take home very little, all of them say that it’s a good place to meet. There is a strong sense of belonging among the volunteers, and there are also ethnic Danes who use the café, some of them for the culinary experience, others for the opportunity to try out their language skills on other people, such as those whose mother-tongue is Chinese.

 

At Café Cadeau immigrants are seen as a gift to society (hence the name ‘cadeau’, from the French word for a gift.). This is a point that Hans Henrik Lund emphasises:

 

”All segments of civil society, including church communities, have a responsibility when it comes to integration. We talk a lot about integration, but it’s also the meeting between Danes and foreigners that’s important. And this must be expressed positively. Immigrants must not be met with only demands and negativity. Here the church communities in our country can do a great deal, both formally and informally,” he says, stressing that this can happen precisely because church communities have an open eye for including people from other faith communities, realising that people are religious.

 

Hans Henrik Lund emphasises that the café is not confessional but that volunteers are more than welcome to refer people to various churches

NB. The Christian Daily received 4,236 public votes in the contest shared between 169 nominated initiatives.

Translated by Edward Broadbridge
Photo: Café Cadeau

By: Anne Jensen, Christian Daily

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