You might have seen us bang on about world cafés a lot these last couple of years. And if you haven’t been to one, you might have also wondered what these evenings are all about. 

What is a world café?

The hint is in the name. World cafés are unstructured and informal, with a series of small tables spread out across the event space (similar to a café setting). Hosted by industry experts, each table has a different topic/theme, and is covered in a large sheet of paper with different coloured markers to capture ideas on the go.

At the beginning of the evening, attendees break off into smaller groups and rotate around said tables every 10-15 minutes. With each rotation, groups are mixed up to bring attendees out of their shells – giving them the opportunity to meet new people whilst encouraging contribution from everyone. As well as taking away learnings and tips, separating the tables like we do also gives attendees the platform to share their own experiences.

We tend to go with 6-8 attendees per table, but this can be adjusted depending on the number of people you have on the night.

*We’ve adapted the world café methodology a little bit to suit the events we are running, but you get the idea!

Why do we use them?

When we launched our student-led community (Taitamariki Potentia) in 2020, we wanted to host events that rangatahi would want to be a part of. What we soon found was that your typical panellist or presentation-style events wouldn’t cut it with our mostly Gen Z audience. While rangatahi still wanted to learn and connect at events, we found that the unstructured and informal style of world cafés was better suited to students!

We run several world cafés each year, so make sure you're following us to keep up-to-date on our latest events, insights and tips!