The Flaming Eggplant Cafe opened in 2008. We are a student-run, non-hierarchical worker collective on The Evergreen State College campus. If you have any questions or thoughts you’d like to share with the Eggplant, please contact us at flamingoutreach@gmail.com.
Mission
The Flaming Eggplant Cooperative Café is a student-run café providing ethically-sourced, affordable food and education in cooperative development at The Evergreen State College.
Values
- Food Justice
- Cooperative Leadership
- Anti-Oppression & Access
- Solidarity & Collective Care
- Transparency & Accountability
Vision
We envision the Eggplant as a gathering space, an educational space, an organizing space, a place to rest, and a place to eat. We envision a crossroads on the college campus where the food system robustly engages with the student body, faculty, staff, and greater community. We envision the Eggplant as a place of learning, experimentation, and practice for the workers who cooperatively manage the café. We envision the Eggplant as a place that centers on building collective power, anti-oppression, and prioritizing our work as part of the movement for collective liberation.
Anti-Oppression Statement
The Flaming Eggplant strives to uphold a space of anti-oppression for community participation, engagement, and enjoyment. As we live in a society where oppression is institutionalized and plays out on interpersonal levels every day, to claim this space a completely “safe” would be impossible. However, we intend to provide a community space that is welcoming, and prioritizes the needs of those who are marginalized and targets of oppression.
To make this happen, The Flaming Eggplant collective members participate in quarterly meetings, discussions, and exercises centering the dismantling of oppressive actions, behaviors, and language within our interactions with one another, and in the cafe itself. These include, but are not limited to, racism, sexism, ageism, sizeism, classism, ableism, cissexism, heterosexism, and sexual harassment.
We ask all people who enter our space to respect others’ physical and emotional boundaries, to be aware of the affects your actions and presence have on others, and to be responsible for your language, behavior, and actions. Please feel free to approach a collective member in confidence should anyone or anything in the cafe make you feel unsafe, including the actions of collective members. Whenever possible, we may ask people to change or address unsafe behavior or language. As a last resort, we reserve the right to ask people to leave the cafe.