Set up a Café

The clear and consistent Baby Café model of care has been proven to work successfully in a variety of settings and is flexible enough to accommodate different community profiles.
This model works when a Baby Café breastfeeding drop-in is fully funded, run by skilled facilitators working closely with local health care providers, and can be freely accessed by all mothers needing support with breastfeeding.
With a proven model to follow and resources and support in place, setting up and running a Baby Café drop-in can be straightforward and time-efficient for staff involved.

Benefits of being a Baby Café

• Baby Café is a proven brand which has built its reputation over 18 years, delivering a high quality and evidence-based service
• Baby Cafe is the only breastfeeding drop in with quality standards attached to it that are subject to monitoring and evaluation.
• Baby Café induction training is provided for your staff, with update events available on request.
• The Baby Café Toolkit gives you step-by-step guidelines for the day to day running of your Baby Café.
• Your Baby Café has its own webpage on the national website, promoting your local service.
• The Baby Café newsletter is sent to all licensed Baby Cafés, allowing you to keep up with news and developments.
• Baby Café evaluation tools allow to you to collect data, with the findings published each year in our annual report.
• Our friendly team are on hand to offer guidance and support, by phone and email.

Applying for a licence

Our name and trade mark is The Baby Café.
You will need to apply for a licence to use the Baby Café name, logo and resources. All genuine Baby Cafés are licensed by us and are listed on this website, and we expect them to be run to the same high standards, following our policies and guidelines. Any other drop-in purporting to be a Baby Café  is using the name without our authorisation.

Register your interest in setting up a Baby Cafe

Once you have registered your interest you should receive an email immediately, containing the links you need to access our online application form and guidance for completing it.

Costs

The costs of setting up your Baby Café will depend on a number of factors.
Service packages can be tailored to meet specific local needs, budgets and staff resources. This can range from supporting a locality to deliver a Baby Café using in-house staff and resources; to full service provision including consultation and assessment of needs, staffing, promotion, project coordination and evaluation.

Please contact us on info@thebabycafe.org or 020 8752 9003 if you would like to discuss a bespoke service.

In the UK, basic fees cover the initial registration fee, induction training for your team, use of branding and access to resources on the password protected area of our website. When setting up a single Baby Café drop-in you will need to budget £675 (correct at February 2018). There may be additional running costs for your service such as venue hire, facilitator fees, refreshments and so on. One of the benefits of being part of The Baby Café network is the amount of assistance you have access to in order to obtain funding to support your project.

All Baby Cafés pay a small renewal fee to maintain access to resources and support.