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Newsletter: February 2025

Ways to Build Community Through Dinner

Several months ago, a beloved restaurant in my neighborhood closed its doors. It had been a popular hangout spot for over a decade, but the owner decided it was time to move on to a new phase of his life. An attempt to turn it over to new ownership proved disastrous, and until just a few weeks ago, the space sat empty and desolate, with no news about its future.

What struck me about the closing of the restaurant was the outcry from the community. People were upset. They were sad. The neighborhood groups were crawling with messages about the loss of this business. Of course it’s always sad when a small business shuts its doors, but our neighborhood has seen lots of places come and go over the years. What was different this time was that this particular restaurant had become a spot where people gathered frequently, got to know their neighbors, became friendly with the staff and owner, and felt good about supporting each other. In short, the restaurant had become synonymous with building community, and its loss left a void.

It got me thinking about community in general, and how we gather and relate to one another. I kept thinking about it as I talked with Dr. Anne Fishel, in our recent podcast episode, about her research into dinners during and after the COVID lockdowns. When families were able to gather for more frequent meals – forced to, really – the thing they most valued, and wanted to hold onto, was the relationships they built through eating together. Sharing food builds bonds.

I’m hearing a lot of talk lately about the desire to get back to more in-person connections and more community-building activities. People are looking for ways to reach out and lend a hand to their neighbors, get to know people they haven’t connected with, and draw closer with friends and family. Not all of us are lucky enough to have access to a neighborhood hotspot where we can share some good food and get to know each other better. So how can we use the relationship-building power of shared meals to satisfy our desire for stronger communities?

Here are some ideas:

  • Create a supper club. Over the years, we’ve come across lots of family and friend groups who schedule regular dinners together to help share the load. (The Super Tuesday friends come to mind!) How can you put that idea into practice in your own life? My own family has recently started instituting monthly Sunday dinners at my mother-in-law’s house; she hosts and makes dessert, I cook a meal to bring, and other participants bring bread, wine, etc. to round things out. Some friends of ours have a weekly cookbook club with other empty-nesters. Another acquaintance does Taco Tuesdays with a neighboring family, while an older male friend of mine has a group of “hungry old guys” who pick a new restaurant to try every Thursday night. Grab a group, decide how often you’ll gather, and make it happen!
  • Stock each other’s freezers. Part of building community is helping each other out. We’ve worked with families on military bases who make dinner easier for one another by hosting soup swaps and other meal-sharing systems, where they make enough food to stock someone else’s freezer (and vice-versa, so everyone benefits). I also recently came across the idea of a freezer-meal baby shower, where instead of having a traditional party with games and gifts, guests came together to cook and assemble freezer meals for the new parents.
  • Send delivery. In this day and age, there are so many ways to feed each other from afar, it’s almost overwhelming. When a dear childhood friend lost her husband last year, I was able to gather a group of friends via text and coordinate ordering soup, bread, and baked goods from a meal service within minutes. A friend of mine recently used a grocery delivery app to send staples like milk, bread, peanut butter, eggs, and some favorite snacks to her sister’s house during a family crisis. My husband’s workplace, during a difficult and stressful period for their work-from-home staff, coordinated lunch deliveries for the whole team and shared photos in the team chat. And some parents in an online group I belong to shared the idea of sending the ingredients for a favorite family meal to their college and young adult kids, so they’d have an excuse to make something that reminded them of home.
  • Cook together. Building on that last idea, you could also contact family members or friends, agree on a recipe, and cook it at the same time – either all together in person, live online, or on the same day at different times. One family I know of has “family dinner nights” with their young adult kids in different cities, where they all agree on what they’ll make, everyone cooks the meal in their own homes, and they gather on Facetime to eat it together. And a social service organization in my city has recently started an initiative for lower-income families, where they can join a monthly virtual cooking club to learn how to make specific recipes together with an online instructor.
  • Add a recipe. Handwritten recipes are slowly fading away; why not bring them back? If you happen to be mailing a birthday card or sending a package to someone you care about, enclose a notecard with a favorite recipe written on it. Add the handwritten recipe card along with a drop-off of cookies to your neighbor. Encourage everyone at the next community potluck to bring copies of their recipe and place them on the table next to the food.
  • Pool your skills. This is a real “get to know your neighbors” challenge, but it could be truly beneficial! If you’ve got a particular skill set, like gardening or baking bread or batch cooking, why not use it to barter with neighbors who have complementary skills? For example: You provide freshly baked bread to your gardening neighbor, who provides you with the vegetables for your soup. Or someone you know has an out-of-control supply of basil or zucchini and no time to make anything with it all, so you take the lot and turn it into pesto or zucchini bread for everyone.
  • Host a community dinner. Of course, I can’t write a newsletter about building community through shared meals without pointing out that The Family Dinner Project has been helping partners across the country create community dinner events for fifteen years now. There have been dozens of different ideas and types of events created by our community partners, from storytime with snack-building stations at public libraries, to cook-together events and food exploration exhibits at a children’s museum, to a fourth-grade “Pasta Palooza” event at a public elementary school. Some partnerships have been especially ambitious, like these recent efforts at Purdue University, which combined on-campus community dinner events with a full-scale effort to reach families in every county across the state of Indiana! You can learn more about different ways to bring The Family Dinner Project to your community on our partnership page – reach out if you’re interested in a community dinner or other opportunity.

There’s no shortage of ways food can bring us all together. Why not pick an idea or two from this list and put it into action in the coming months? You might be surprised at the results. And if you’ve got your own great ideas about creating community through shared meals, we’d love to hear about them – connect with us via email, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads.

Food

Nothing says shareable quite like a big pot of soup! This simple, low-cost Santa Fe Chicken Soup can be made in a slow cooker or on the stovetop.

Santa Fe Chicken Soup

Fun

This Message in a Bottle activity is a great way to build community through kindness and the power of positive messages!

Message in a Bottle

Conversation

Try these questions about community to kickstart some brainstorming with your family tonight!