The cafe model, without the burnout.

Kirsty Porter founded Umbrella Dementia Cafes to give people living with dementia and their carers somewhere to connect, exchange support and find community. Across five sites, she had trained every facilitator and volunteer personally, one-on-one, every time. The model worked, but only when Kirsty was the one delivering it.

Kirsty has decades of knowledge in setting up successful dementia cafes, but every time she trained another community leader, she burned out. Her training material was scattered across folders and folders of Word documents, some out of date. Every month, more requests arrived from communities across Australia. Most had to be turned away. The ceiling wasn't demand. It was how far one person's capacity could stretch.

Writing the knowledge down hadn't captured it. What made each cafe work was relational and layered, built over years of personal training in empathy, communication and volunteer dynamics. We turned the folders of documents into a structured train-the-trainer program, working with Kirsty to define three facilitator groups she had been training for years without formally naming them, and built a train-the-trainer platform around each. Other community leaders can now adopt it and run their own cafe, without Kirsty's one-to-one time.

• The train-the-trainer program rebuilt as an online platform: facilitators and volunteers prepared without Kirsty present.
• Three organisations in active partnership conversations to expand nationally.
• Kirsty no longer the single point of failure in every new cafe's setup.
• A platform that explains the model clearly to funders, partners and new organisations.