The Blind Café offers an opportunity for people to relate to one another in a unique and inspiring way. When people interact with one another, our visual conditioning, social etiquette and constant interruptions often cloud us.

While in the dark we:


• Offer people an opportunity to notice how they judge one another from our visual conditioning. This gives our guests a chance to drop there prejudges towards one another and recalculate how we behave socially and treat one another.

• Offer people an opportunity to learn to be more present. Learn to listen more intently and relate to one another intuitively. In the dark people’s habitual social conditioning is interrupted thus giving them a chance to learn new ways of relating.

• Offer people an opportunity to relinquish control of visually mapping our environments and thus becoming more acutely sensitive to their other senses such as listening, taste, touch and smell.

• Offer people an opportunity to sing, cry and laugh out loud uninhibitedly in a social environment. This is especially empowering with the blind wait staff and blind guests who in normal lighted environments assume they are always being watched or seen by their sighted community. In the dark at the blind café, these blind persons get to experience being in public without this experience of being watched.

• Offer people an opportunity to ask important questions they would never ask in the light.

• Offer people an opportunity to be iven the freedom to be ‘seen’ differently from our physical physique such as age, color, race and even gender.

The Blind Café ‘s current goals are to establish The Blind Café as a financially sustainable organization. We plan to this by developing funding resources and profitable business models to continue exploring how we can make a positive impact on the quality of the lives of people we’ve reached with our work.

Specifically, we are:

• Piloting a ‘Blind Café Youth Program’ on Nov. 16th in Boulder, CO. We are collaborating with the ‘Youth Services Initiative (YSI) of The City of Boulder Parks and Rec. whose mission is to provide youth from low income families the opportunities and resources necessary to make positive recreational, educational and lifestyle choices. We have a received a $1000 grant from the Boulder Arts Commission to hold a one night Blind Café event for youths the age of 11 – 17. Our goal is to develop a ‘Blind Café Youth Program’ that we feel will powerfully changes the lives and perspective of the kids who attend. We hope to launch an ongoing program in collaboration with the City of Boulder Parks and Rec. in 2013.

• Developing Blind Café ‘Corporate Training Programs’ that can offer opportunities for businesses and private groups to explore the darkness in the area’s of diversity education, community development, non-violence communication, listening, team building, and many other types of trainings offering in depth social re-relating experiences. Our goal is to establish this area of the organization to bring in profitable income to help support and continue our to improve and develop our core Program and other area’s of community outreach.

• Continue to innovate and improve our core ‘Blind Café Concert, Sensory Tasting and Discussion in the Dark Program’ The goal of our core ‘Blind Café Concert, Sensory Tasting and Discussion in the Dark Program’ is to help thousands and thousands of people, around the world, feel more connected to themselves and their community.

The Blind Cafe helps people feel connected and open to one another. People become more open, trusting and bonded when they have gone through some type of 'ordeal' together. Much like an outward bound trip when a group of people go out into the wilderness for 10 days as strangers and come back best friends, the experience of being in the dark together for several hours acts much the same way. The volunteers, the blind waitstaff, the musicians and the guests, all go through an experience working together in the dark and come out feeling more alive, awake and present with their lives.

"It dawned on me that I most likely hadn’t listened to music in the dark like this since I was a young teenager. It was so liberating to allow my mind and ears to focus on instrumentation with no visual input. I couldn’t tell if Rosh was on some shockingly coveted Martin guitar, or some $200 Korean-made junker. It must have been something of decent caliber, as it sounded wonderful, but was that because I was only listening that it sounded that good?"

- Brian Johnson | The Marquee

"We were impressed with the absolute darkness, quick dependence upon our blind guides, openness and warmth of the blind guides who answered all audience questions, diversity of tastes in the well-prepared food, and intimacy of the music. We've recommended the evening to many of our friends."

-Marian and Ken, Boulder Blind Cafe