Conversations with Coffee, the pilot project pairing English-speaking volunteers with ESL learners, will move to a new location and time beginning next week.
The bilingual conversations — featuring free coffee and free speech — will now be held weekly on Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to noon at the First United Methodist Church, 1100 Third Street in Perry.
The first sessions of Conversations with Coffee were held in the 10th Street Bistro at the Dallas County Hospital and were led by Dr. Judith Conlin, executive director of the Iowa International Center (IIC), a non-profit agency with a long history of working with immigrants and refugees from around the world.
Conlin said the Conversations with Coffee program, initiated several years ago by IIC’s Ashley Molzen, started out small at the Forest Avenue Library in Des Moines.
“Our first meeting had just two learners and three volunteers,” Conlin said. Today the Des Moines coffee chats typically draw 30 to 40 people, about half volunteers and half English learners, with members from the Congo, Burma, Eritrea and many other countries. Conlin said the program served 120 English learners last year.
“And the program isn’t only for native Spanish speakers,” Conlin said, describing her experiences conversing with a Russian speaker who wished to improve her English pronunciation, a Burmese speaker whose improved English skills helped her work up from housekeeping to a management position and a Salvadoran laundry worker who spoke eruditely of Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and T.S. Eliot.
“He was really better read than a lot of my native-English-speaking friends,” Conlin said with a laugh.
Perry’s Conversations with Coffee program has seen a similarly modest beginning. Volunteers at the first meeting were Mike and Georgia Draeger of Perry and Jan Kaiser of Woodward. Perry Public Library Director Mary Murphy also attended.
IIC also offers a Welcome to Iowa website that serves as an 80-language clearinghouse for critical information for refugees and immigrants. They also offer a free 24/7 emergency interpretation hotline that helps service agencies and first responders assist speakers with limited English skills throughout Iowa.
The Conversations with Coffee project is part of the Perry Public Library’s year-long Latino-Americans: 500 Years of History program. Funding for the program comes from Humanities Iowa, which is partnering with the Perry Public Library, Hometown Heritage, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach and the Dallas County Hospital. Additional funding comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Library Association (ALA).
Perry was one of 203 communities across the U.S. to receive the Latino Americans: 500 Years of History grant, which also provides public programming — such as public film screenings, lectures, discussion groups, oral history initiatives, local history exhibitions or performances — about Latino history and culture.
For more information about the program, call the Perry Public Library at 515-465-3569 or email Library Director Mary Murphy at mmurphy@perrypl.org.
The project’s national and community partners include the ALA, NEH, Des Moines Area Community College, Hispanics United for Perry, Hometown Heritage, Perry Public Library, Dallas County Hospital, Friends of the Perry Public Library, City of Perry, Hotel Pattee, La Poste, KICK Marketing, Salsa Des Moines, Iowa International Center, Carnegie Library Museum, ThePerryNews.com, The Perry Chief, KDLS, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, the Perry-Area Chamber of Commerce, the Perry Community School district and the Center for Towncraft.
