Nexus Night Café, Every Saturday night/Sunday morning: 2AM - 6AM
Scrumptious food, hot music and exclusive visuals; Nexus Night Cafe provides a safe, welcoming and secret space in the Nexus basement where Manchester clubbers and assorted night-owls come together for a post club/bar wind-down.
“A truly unique nocturnal operation”
Aims/Ethos
The aims of the Night Café over the past five years of its life have been to provide a welcoming, safe environment in which to get people home safely after a night out and to help tackle the problems of alcohol related crime and bogus taxis. We work in partnership with the council and local bars, pubs and clubs to provide a safe, strictly no alcohol space in the city centre once other venues have shut for the night where people can have access to freshly made, organic and locally sourced food while they wait for a taxi in the warm.
More than a glorified taxi rank, we are also able to extend to users an exciting programme of arts events such as Beatnik TV- a late night mini short film festival, music concerts, film showings and other one off curiosities and oddities. Past events have included a pyjama party, live musical accompaniment to a silent movie, giant games night and many, many more.
Underpinning the entire operation are the Nexus Night Cafe volunteers who give their time, skills and experience to ensure its smooth running. Whether going out on to the streets to flyer, helping behind the bar, phoning taxis or simply ensuring Night Café visitors are happy, warm and having fun, the volunteers are our biggest asset.
Nexus Night Cafe is an utterly unique destination for users of Manchester’s night-time economy and the foundations are set to roll out an extensive marketing campaign for summer 2010 to raise awareness of the services we offer and increase numbers through the door each week. As part of this, we are looking to recruit a person to help lead the night café project forward and push it into new territory.
Role requirements & key duties and responsibilities
•Responsible for planning, co-ordinating and successfully running the Night Café each week
•Self motivated and able to work on own initiative
•Building and maintaining strong working relationships local authorities, bars, clubs
•Fundraising for the project
•Reporting to existing funders and stakeholders
•Working with the community development worker and being responsible for recruitment, training, continual support and welfare of volunteers
•A strong leader
•The ability to quickly and effectively establish rapport with a wide variety of people, from staff and volunteers to drunk people and police
•Work with security to ensure that the no-alcohol/drugs policy is effectively enforced
•Make sure everybody who walks through the door experiences a warm welcome and ensure volunteer interaction and care with visitors
The team co-ordinator would have a commitment of 2 weekends out of every 6, running the cafe between 1.30am and 6am on a Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, as well as 3.5 hours weekly to coordinate staff and volunteers, with possibility for extended office hours in the future as the project develops.
We are also looking to recruit a team of 4-5 people to share the NNC shifts between them. This would require commitment of 2 weekends out of every 6, running the cafe between 1.30am and 6am on a Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.
So I'll be starting that and I'll update you on what I get up to. I'm also in the process of booking the Maybridge Community Church:
for the Junction 49 project. I should be going up to Winchester to have the 'Big Meeting' to sort out the budget and artwork for promo stuff. Everything seems to be coming together and all my work is paying off :) I started getting into doing an art project again and was working on some draiwngs based on old photos that I found in albums and boxes. I came up with some interesting ideas, maybe I'll carry on because it's so easy to pick up.
