Beers and bants.

We pledge to meet people where they are at, both in terms of their unconscious biases and perceptions, and in terms of where they physically are.

We asked ourselves, where do the real conversations happen? Where are people most honest? and more likely to wind up chatting with someone they have not met before?… the pub of course!

We initially tested out this idea of bringing our cause to the community by opening a temporary ‘conversation cafe’ in an empty shop in the Four Seasons Shopping Centre (Mansfield). However, people were apprehensive about entering and approaching us. This was slightly less the case when we began offering free cake, but the whole thing felt a bit more twee than the riot we had been hungry for.

Cue the wonderful team at Capo Lounge (Mansfield) swooping in to offer us the opportunity to take over the bar once a month. The nights became known as ‘Tapas & Talk’ as the guys at Capo offered to bring out free to those engaging in conversations. This changed everything. We were invited to train the staff on the OneConversation approach, and established Capo as a second home. On a monthly basis we transform the bar into a neurodiverse conversational fairground in which patrons are quickly compelled to come and connect with us. The bells and horns of our quick-fire response rounds and ‘would you rather…’ challenges interact elegantly with the relaxing of inhibitions (you know, when you’ve had a pint), creating an irresistible draw to anyone with even the slightest of curiosity.

What transpires from this is pretty neat. Conversations flow between people who would never ordinarily have exchanged any words whatsoever, and many of the myths and stereotypes generally held about people with intellectual and developmental disabilities evaporate there and then. Sure some of them hold - certain activists might be hard to understand, and others might be quite repetitive, fixated, or intense - but it is in the way that our activists take ownership over these things that people come to see that the intellectually and developmentally disabled can actually be really cool, and that they have more in common with them than would have been presumed.

The long and short of it is that every time we do a night in the bar, we see that personal connection breeds greater understanding and appreciation - two ingredients that are essential if we are going to convince society to stop mistreating and infantilising the cognitively impaired.