Francophone Fridays returns to Charlottetown cafe
The weekly event is hosted in partnership with Canadian Parents for French
A coffee shop in Charlottetown is now hosting a weekly event to make French-speaking Islanders feel a little more at home.
Timothy's Cafe has partnered with Canadian Parents for French to bring back its weekly noon-time Francophone Fridays event. The cafe's owner Campbell Webster said the new partnership will allow the coffee shop to breathe new life into the event and bring more French-speaking Islanders together to celebrate their culture.
"Often communities, or cultural communities, have a restaurant or a community centre where they hang out and in Charlottetown there wasn't really a designated cafe," Webster explained. "We thought, well why not do that every Friday, have some music and some traditional Acadian food."
Webster said through the new partnership with Canadian Parents for French, the cafe will be able to bring in live music every week. Timothy's has also partnered with a local Acadian catering company that will offer traditional cuisine at the event every other week.
"We have more partners, a lot of the French associations," Webster said. "The French community is sort of coming around it a little bit more."
New French flare
Gail Lecky, executive director of Canadian Parents for French P.E.I., said the new partnership was a perfect fit for the organizations mandate to create more opportunities for french-speakers to practice their language outside of the workplace or classroom.
"It has to be a social thing, it has to be part of their life and how they enjoy life," Lecky said. "Language is not just for learning it's for enjoying and living in the language."
Funding for the weekly event comes from a grant from the Canadian Heritage Foundation, which has allowed the organization to give the cafe an added level of French flare, Lecky said. The cafe has a new mural inspired by French cafes of the 1930s as well as new table cloths to give it a more traditional look, she added.
She added that the organization hopes to draw as many French-speaking Islanders, and those who want to learn French, out to the cafe to make them feel more comfortable in a space that would ordinarily be English-speaking only.
"People work really hard to become bilingual or to keep their first language," Lecky said. "It's a great opportunity to have a place to go that's social and common, you know everybody comes to a coffee shop."
Schools, seniors homes
Lecky said the organization also plans to partner with schools in the French Language School Board, French-speaking seniors' homes and other francophone organizations to create more opportunities for Islanders to practice the language.
Jermie Buote is a student at Ecole Francois-Buote, completing a co-op class by working at the cafe. He organized a class trip for his peers the last time Timothy's hosted French Fridays and said he's looking forward to getting group together for another visit this year.
"Especially on Prince Edward Island, where not a lot of people speak French, it's great to try to encourage people to express themselves in French," Buote said. "Anywhere you go on Prince Edward Island you'll be served in English, so it's just important to promote, you know, French speaking outside of school.
"A lot of times it's only in classrooms that you'll hear French being spoken by kids, but it's just great to be outside, speaking French and getting a French service," he added.
Building a community
Webster said the coffee shop's new partnership means Timothy's will be able to bring more entertainment into the cafe and also help foster more partnerships with French associations across the Island.
"The entertainment here at the end will be each other," Webster said. "Once you create a space where people come to hang out and be in French, the community is their own entertainment ... what's exciting is that you're in a room where you're all speaking French in a cafe where you didn't have that before in Charlottetown."