Xochi the Dog Cafe stands as a beacon of resilience and community spirit in the heart of East Oakland’s Clinton neighborhood. Founded with the intention of fostering connections and preparedness within the community, this unique establishment has become a beloved gathering place where neighbors come together over coffee, events, and shared experiences. 

But more than a friendly neighborhood cafe, Xochi the Dog Cafe is a small business with a big vision: to expand and become a community resilience hub. The cafe is a perfect example of how a diversity of sites – both large and small – play crucial roles in building thriving and resilient communities.

Community Building at the Heart

Tae Ha, a first generation immigrant from South Korea with a background in child psychology and landscape design, founded Xochi the Dog Cafe in 2021 after being inspired by the need to build community resilience following the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic. 

Ha created a cafe friendly to both dogs and humans, with a focus not just on drinking delicious coffee, but also curating events for the neighborhood. The evenings are full of events and programming — from poetry, art installations, to movie nights, each event suggested by cafe regulars and bringing in a joyful community vibe. 

Manifesting a Resilience Hub

Having seen the impacts a small cafe can have on bringing a neighborhood together, Ha decided to expand further. In the last couple of years, she purchased the lot next to the cafe to build another space specifically focused on acting as a community resilience hub. Inspired by the village model present in many cultures, Ha also plans to start a non-profit called New Village Oakland that would operate out of this site.

The overall goal of developing this new site is for it to be at once, a safe space during a climate disruption and an inviting space space where neighbors can come and learn about climate issues and how to better prepare for climate disruptions

A cafe doubling as a resilience hub might seem like a novel idea, but Ha reminds us that many neighborhood coffee shops inherently perform the “everyday” functions of resilience hubs at a micro level, from being a relaxing community space where community members feel comfortable to providing bulletin boards that share local information.

“We need a space to bring people together, we need a village. That is what my idea of a village is coming from there,” said Ha.

“A lot of non-profit organizations are trying to reach out to the communities, and they are not successful because there is this deep sense of distrust. [It’s] people in the community versus the people coming from outside of the community. So how do we make that barrier more soft, more permeable?” said Ha.

So far, members of the community have come together to help clean up the lot next door, but additional funding is still needed to allow the site to be fully realized. Ha has expressed difficulty in finding smaller grants that would help fund the development of the resilience space next door. This is a common issue for non-municipal resilience hubs, and it illustrates the need for smaller resilience hub grants specifically geared towards community-based organizations.

With the additional space, Ha also hopes to expand the type of events they host, starting to focus more on educational programming such as repair events and environmental education. They hope to use the yard at the new site to create a community garden and nursery with a vibrant outdoor space to host community dinners and other outdoor programming.

 Considering that the surrounding community is low and middle-income, Xochi the Dog Cafe and New Village Oakland hope to offer free programming to the surrounding community to allow individuals to come together to learn from each other, whether it be through practicing yoga, learning to garden, taking an emergency preparedness class, or learning how to mend household items.

Xochi the Dog Cafe represents a new model for non-municipal resilience sites, and Ha envisions it becoming a replicable prototype. 

“How can we create this model in different parts of West Oakland, East Oakland, other areas?”

Emergency Infrastructure Vision

Both the cafe and the site next door envision becoming fully electric. Ha is working on getting solar panels for the site, and with the planned addition of a backup battery, the cafe would have backup power during an emergency, Then the annexed property to become a potential shelter and/or resource distribution site during times of disaster. Ha also expressed that the new property would be an ideal location to host disaster preparedness trainings, such as CERT (Community Emergency Response Training) program.