ESC: Altérez-Vous - Citizen Café in a student city

L’Altérez-vous "is a citizen café” created in 2009. As a cooperative with a social purpose (and not for profit), it aims to promote responsible consumption by offering quality products from fair trade, organic farm and local production. Specific events are organized from time to time with the aim of sharing and exchanging knowledge: debates and conferences on social issues, cultural evenings, concerts, shows and creative workshops. L'Alterez-Vous project can be summed up in 3 points: conviviality, responsible consumption and awareness. Friendliness allows us to open up to the widest possible audience. We achieve this through activities, games sessions, concerts, free stages, knitting workshops, conversation tables or even writing workshops. The café is a place of sharing and meetings and exchanges, the activities are open to all and proposals are welcome. We support the use and consumption of ethic products, through local, seasonal, organic and fair trade products. Through this, we support small producers, local craftwork and meaningful projects. We raise awareness of societal themes, the main objective of the café, through the organization of debates, conversation tables, meetings with producers, information that we provide to our audience and visibility of concrete citizen initiatives. More specifically, here are examples of activities organized in 2018-2019 within the citizen café Altérez-Vous: - Alternating concerts and free stages on Fridays: jazz, funk, soul concerts, etc ... Free stages for Jam Sessions, "aperitif-tales", ... - Conversation tables in Spanish, Dutch and German on Monday and Wednesday evenings - Writing, embroidery and knitting workshops every other Wednesday, ... - "Jeu de Go" Boards game evenings on Tuesday evenings - One-off events: documentary brunch, film screenings followed by a debate, presentation of associations and citizen initiatives, improvisation shows, One Man Show on food, conferences on ecology and natural resources, exhibitions, ... - Visits and meetings with producers: brewery, market gardeners, farms, cooperatives, ... - "Troc-café", "Repair-Café", workshop where you exchange knowledge and services… Altérez-Vous is a project that allows you to meet different people and to do catering for a social purpose. With this project, we want to prove that it is possible to develop an initiative that holds up from an economic point of view, while being the bearer of ecological and human values. Since 2021, the cooperative extands with the creation of L'Alter d'en Face. As it is named, it is located just in front of l'Altérez-vous Café. L'Alter d'en Face was born from the idea of ​​being able to offer much more space for workshop, debates, movie projection and so on. The goal as for L'Altérez-vous is to create a friendly place, a real living space where people or non profit organisation can use. Also, L'Alter d'en Face is a place where we offer accessible, fast and healthy snacks, room people can hire and and imagine events for young and old people. The activities are aimed to a very large audience: young university students, artists, the elderly, the curious or even a dropout audience. Everyone is welcome at Altérez-Vous. The type of audience usually varies depending on the day of the week. Indeed, if the public is mainly students or in a certain way in connection with the university (professors, assistants, doctoral students, researchers ...) during the week, the public becomes more family during the weekend.