Utopian dreaming; community hubs
A short imagination exercise dreaming of a community hub with a swimming pool, library, healthcare and a community cafe serving surplus food.
SHORT THOUGHTSIMAGINATION
Emma Woods
10/8/20242 min read
You arrive at the hub a few minutes before your community accupuncture appointment and walk to the community run cafe to check out the menu. Today's offering is Spaghetti Carbonara; Soy chicken Korma and rice; Veggie bean chili and rice; or quiche and salad. You wander upstairs for your accupuncture appointment where you're greeted by a friendly face.
An hour later feeling more relaxed you head back to the cafe and order Carbonara, latte and pick up some corn on the cobs from the community pantry. There's a minimum payment of £3 but you pay a bit more to support the community cafe and the hub. You sit and enjoy your food and drink surrounded by a vibrant mix of people from different communities, hearing different languages and accents.
Once you've finished your food you take out your laptop and finish off some work in the library. There's some general chatter but being surrounded by other people somehow feels comforting after the isolation of working from home recently.
You wrap up your work and head to the small swimming pool for a quick swim before returning to the cafe to pick up some frozen meals, all made from food saved from landfill and cooked locally. Again, you can choose how much to pay for the meals.
sounds like a utopian dream, right?
Nope.
I just described my Tuesday.
I'm often told that I'm naive to dream of a better world, or that there are no alternatives to our current reality of capitalism. But as I learnt "From what is to what if" by Rob Hopkins the future is already here if you look in the right places.
Food Works in Sheffield grows and share surplus food at their food markets, use it to run community cafes and make delicious frozen meals also whilst empowering the community through skill sharing and support. They save over 500 tonnes of food from landfill every year, with the main food market distributing 100+ food boxes everyday.
Their food market and cafes are run on a pay what you can afford basis, with a minimum donation of £1, making their food accessible, affordable and healthy whilst also being environmentally sustainable.
The community hub is the Zest Center in Sheffield is a community enterprise that offers meeting spaces, a library, computer, employment support, community swimming pool and gym, health support and hosts the Food Works cafe mentioned above.
Alternatives to the status quo have always existed, they have just been squeezed to the margins of an economic system obsessed with profit, efficiency and accumulation. If you look closely enough, you'll find them and when you do, support them in anyway you can.
― Arundhati Roy