The Welcome Café, a Dublin 7 integration initiative. The Welcome Café now running for over 6 years run by volunteers, a mix of community activists and artists, in Dublin 7. The aim of the initiative is to promote the integration, social inclusion and cultural exchange among the diverse groups including Irish living in Ireland. The Welcome Café runs events which facilitate informal social contact, learning and celebrating diverse cultures and forms of artistic expression while also promoting awareness of the complex issues related to migration and finding a home in a new country. Much of the focus is on arts and music the project also pays attention to the more difficult aspects of integration such as prejudice, racism, cultural misunderstandings. The Welcome Café events, take place in the 3rd Space Cafe Smithfield. This café has a strong community ethos which contributes greatly to the sense of safety and confidence about the different identities bringing a large number of people of different ethnic, cultural, social, faith and language backgrounds to the Café events

We wish to build on of the Welcome Café experiences and to initiate an exploration, through various art forms, of Smithfield as a community / neighbourhood which has many different facets. It is an old neighbourhood with a long and interesting history that has changed greatly in recent decades and now includes more recent residents, some of whom are very short term due to current housing crisis.

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.