Who We Are

Mission & Vision

Bailey’s Café is a space of community healing and belonging — a secular church, a home, a kitchen table. Bailey’s welcomes all with an open heart, compassion and love, generating a culture of belongingness, non-judgment, acceptance, community, and space to be your full self. This is Bailey’s unique value.

Bailey’s Café creates an environment for

• youth to come together and grow through creativity, imagination, and communion
• elders and youth come together to communicate, share and learn
• the “rough around the edges” be welcomed in a nonjudgmental space
• deep personal connections
• exposure to new things such as radical self-wellness, different forms of arts
• continuation of culture in the neighborhood
• investigation and challenging of gentrification
• safe space to connect and belong across their differences
• a home with a welcoming energy
• a responsive space that is doing what the community needs at the moment
• a space that loves communities it serves

“Bailey’s Café” is a literary reference, from a novel of the same name by Gloria Naylor, based on the stories of people who find themselves at the edge of the world and seek a place to heal and ground themselves. At our core, we believe that healthy, vibrant communities have spaces where people can go to find their personal relevance and sense of purpose, nurture their individual growth, and make connections with other people, including across generations. We create physical and virtual spaces in partnership with local leaders, artists, and inter-generational volunteers, through a focus on community building, service, and the arts.

Bailey’s in Brooklyn
Lyrics and Music by Michael Hill
Performed by Michael Hill, Kymbali Craig and Bailey’s Members

What We Do

Since its founding in 2003, Bailey’s Café has focused in primarily two areas:

1. Community Building, Service and Wellness
2. Arts Education and Production

Across our programs, Bailey’s Café builds inter-generational connections and story sharing, exposing our participants to new experiences, honoring the stories of those whose voices are seldom heard and helping to develop a sense of possibility, healing and renewal through community-based organizing and artistic expression.

Who We Serve

Bailey’s Café is Brooklyn-based and our roots are in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. We serve community members in the Central Brooklyn area. We are committed to working in communities across New York City that lack Bailey’s Café type spaces and programs.

Core Values

1. Relationships are Key: Positive, reciprocal relationship building is a primary part of our process. They are key to individual healing, creativity and community building.
2. Inter-generational Matters: In our work and relationships we are always striving to find new ways to “bridge the gap” between all generations and to break down barriers that prevent us from building healthy, peaceful communities.
3. Everyone’s Story Counts: Story sharing is fundamental to our creative work; it is a tool for gaining an understanding of ourselves, others and the world around us.
4. Environment Matters: We respect and nurture our surroundings, the ones we find ourselves in and the ones we create.
5. Practice Non Violence in Our Speech and Actions: We strive to model non-violence in our work and relationships, between staff, participants, community and our environment.