The Food for Thought Network is establishing a new initiative titled The 9 Muses Cafe, which will be launched on 19 May at the Living Room restaurant in Templestowe.

In an endeavour to forever inspire, connect and empower women in Australia, The 9 Muses Cafe is an initiative that will provide a safe avenue for women to discuss topics that have been previously unarticulated. Speaking about controversial and somewhat unspoken experiences in a small, supportive and safe space will enable women to have a strong voice and to talk about their lived experiences.

The initiative was inspired by a challenge posed to the Food for Thought Network by Dean Kalymnios in a Neos Kosmos article in March. Here, Kalymnios posed a moving idea in saying, “self-knowledge can only come from a deep respect and sensitivity to the unique and largely unarticulated experience of Greek Australian women within our community.” From this, The 9 Muses Cafe was inspired in the hope that these unarticulated experiences and stories can inspire solutions that can benefit individuals, families and the Greek Australian community.

The program will offer a defined topic for discussion in the first session, surrounding current issues raised in the mainstream and ethnic media, and will be followed by a survey to gauge audience interests. The program’s first topic is ‘mixed relationships’, discussing how to make inter-racial relationships work in the face of common traditional pressures felt by Greek women to marry Greek. The topic raise questions as to how to deal with the pressure, the reactions of others, marriage and children, and processes and life challenges that mixed marriage couples may experience. Psychologist Kia Atoniadis will be the guest speaker for the first discussion. Atoniadis has been working with the Australian Greek Welfare Society (AGWS) for the past four years as a family counsellor, counselling families around ageing issues and from different cultural backgrounds.

The topics for the following months will depend on the survey’s results. The 9 Muses Cafe occurs every second month on the third Tuesday of the month at 7.30 pm. Entry is free for Food for Thought members, $15 for non-members, and food and drink is an additional cost.
For more information, please contact Varvara Ioannou at info@fftn.org.au