We’re hiring a Café Manager
BRIG CAFÉ: Café Manager Role
A vibrant café that has a reputation of community activism, offering a range of fresh fair-trade coffee, herbal teas, and locally sourced breads, cakes, sandwiches, pizzas, pies, quiches, and soups.
By day a warm delightful café and drop-in workspace open to students, and home-based workers as well as typical café customers. By night an open and inclusive café-style venue for small events, artists, music, spoken word, poetry and book clubs. With an evening menu of locally sourced wines, beers, pies, pizzas and snacks.
We want the walls to feature local anti-racist campaigners (artists, photographers and images of community activism).
We want it to become a cultural and intellectual hub where discussions about climate justice, social justice, and artistic expression become intertwined.
Key features of the Café:
▪ A fully operational café – open to the public 4-7 days a week
▪ A space known for anti-racist activism and attracting green campaigning groups, LGBTQ+ and feminist groups.
▪ A workspace for our team and board – using the open workspace model (hiring FOE facilities for private meetings).
▪ To sub-contract the kitchen for up-and-coming chefs as a well-known pop-up café to enable a weekday and evening restaurant, encouraging start-ups and social entrepreneurs.
Why and Anti-Racist Café?
“Where activists collide”.
Lasting change will not come from politics or campaigning alone. It will come from the arts, our acceptance of differences and from a combination of campaigning movements.
Yet so many of our activist projects are delivered in silos.
If we worked on our shared vision – equality, social-justice, environmentalism, we could more often pool shared objectives, resources and increase our campaigning base.
Racism does not occur is isolation of intersectionality (e.g. race and gender, race and sexual identity race and disability and indeed race and Climate change). Similarly, the ‘Green’ agenda has been the preserve of white middle class activists and needs to embrace race, youth, and working-class priorities.
We want this space to be a space where all of our activisms collide and where we appeal to people of all ethnicities, ages, class and sexual identities to feel safe and to embrace our differences and our shared identity as humans.
Café Manager Role
Understanding racism, intersectionality, how white privilege shows up, is essential to the creation of an inclusive space. This may be in terms of the music, the menu and the experience of the Black community in the space.
In addition, we have to make this space work sustainably as a business, so as not to be drawing monthly on BRIG limited reserves.
In year one, we have funds to pay the rent, all other funds must come from:
▪ Sales in the café
▪ Bookings of the café
▪ Catering at Events
▪ Takings at events
The key role of the Acting Manager therefore is to:
▪ Create a space that feels comfortable and inclusive (music, imagery, menu)
▪ Build a simple menu at a sustainable price-point
▪ Ensure we are compliant (Health & Safety, Food Hygiene, Bar Management)
▪ Manage Café & Kitchen Bookings & Invoicing
▪ Ensure payments (for cashflow)
▪ Manage social media (ensuing images are inclusive)
▪ Manage Food Orders
▪ Manage the Café Baristas, Cooks & Rotas
▪ Reporting the BRIG board (monthly)
▪ Build partnerships
▪ Create a Marketing Strategy for Social Media and Communications
Payment this role pays £2,000 per month (with a 3 month probationary period)
Essential Requirements
• Reporting Monthly to BRIG board
• Excellent Financial Management Skills
• Excellent Customer Service
• Excellent Communication skills (written & verbal)
• Level 3+ Food Hygiene
• Excellent Organisational skills
• Ability to build partnerships
The Café Manger will:
Understand activism, especially anti-racist activism
Be able to build partnerships with other anti-racist groups (SUTR, Bham Black Sisters, Catalyst for Change, Red Earth, etc.
Please send a CV with covering letter as to how you meet the requirements of the role here.
The closing date for applications is 27th December. Interviews will take place on 6th January.
About The Birmingham Race Impact Group (BRIG)
We are proud citizens of Birmingham with lived experience of racism, who want to create and live in an anti-racist city.
To achieve this, we want to bring our many years of knowledge and experience as individual race equality policy practitioners to try something different that creates an anti-racist movement, which takes all the city's various stakeholders on a journey to achieve this.
Our Vision: An Anti-Racist City (*)
Our Mission:
▪ To Keep Race on the Agenda
▪ To hold institutions to account
▪ To pass on the baton of the anti-racist movement to future generations.
Our Main activities include:
▪ The Race History Detectives: teaching young people to learn from past anti-racist struggles and activities and to develop a repository of activism & best practice.
▪ To establish a National Centre for World Cultures which creates a shared space to celebrate Birmingham as a superdiversity city.
▪ To identify a series of cultural hot-spots and history trails in and around Birmingham
▪ The Leadership Academy: to work with our academic institutions and create a benchmark for anti-racist leadership of a super-diverse city.
▪ Creation and adoption of the Race Code: a kite mark for anti-racist organisations
▪ To conduct primary research and to collect stories of those experiencing racism.
▪ To collect and collate evidence of racism within the sectors of the city (education (HE & FE), social housing, health, criminal justice, social care, and the voluntary sector and to work withing each sector to create a 10-year Race Action Plan.
▪ Through our by annual summit and mini summits, to work with communities, partners, and stakeholders to create an anti-racist city.
Anti racist (a verb i.e. a doing word) i.e. doing/being proactive “Anti-racism is being proactive individually and collectively against the oppression of racialised groups and the causes, manifestations, and impacts of systemic racism."
Our Backstory
On the 4th of June 2020 more than 5000 young people, elders, and families stood united for the Black Lives Matter protest in Centenary Square, Birmingham.
It was Birmingham’s response to yet another senseless murder of a Blackman.
Many of us had been here before, in the 1960s, 1970s and more significantly the 1981-85 uprisings, this continues to be a regular occurrence.
We could now predict the play book. It’s wasteful cycle of outrage, noise and silence.
Race, is back on the agenda.
There will be a commission…
There will be a report…
Outsiders will be brought in to investigate, units opened and refreshed.
Then, as the outrage subsides, race will once again fall off the agenda…
Until the next murder!
Yes, we have been here before and are likely to be here again because all we ever get is “performativism” the pretence of doing something but never actually doing anything meaningful.
We set up structures, but ‘structures’ don’t deliver and there is no learning about what has or hasn’t worked – there is no progress or deeper understanding of how systemic, embedded, societal and structural racism operates.
The anti-racist reactionary movement has been in a perpetual loop: one step forward, that is driven by a hiatus of activity in responding to the here and now; one step backwards, until it falls off the agenda AGAIN!
The perpetual loop continues.
Anti-racist measures are “hard.”
Let’s just follow a ‘tick box’ approach.
Like climate action there is no sustainability.
Anti-racism is more important now than ever before because here in Birmingham, we are a minority majority city with 70% of pupils of colour in our schools.
We need to act collectively as one to bring change.