Surviving the Pandemic: Sustainability of Community Cafes without Safety Assurance

Abstract

A community café chose to remain open for serving during the pandemic. Cafes that can also be specified as a small business are often owned by a group of people (community). Whilst they also hire some employees who are coming from the lower class in the society. This article is using a qualitative approach to conduct the participatory observation and in-depth interview. Those steps are necessary to construct the reasons why community cafes are still open as a form of survival to the social entrepreneurship community. Reasons for the community cafes to stay open are, first, to empower the employees who do not have any other source of income. Second, like other small business, community cafés are prone to bankruptcy for absent of business insurance to give them a comfortable cushion. Third, community cafes must hold onto the profit and loss principal to get the surplus off their business. The survivability of community cafes during this pandemic depends on their ability to follow all of the health protocols and precautions in the bare minimum. All they can ask their customers and employees to wear a mask and provide a handwashing station that they built using some simple tools. In macro level, their low rate of survivability shows that stakeholders are absent to support the social entrepreneurship during the pandemic