Our work at The Dinner Party Labs is based on a simple premise: Healing is a collective enterprise.
Strengthening our civic fabric requires talking to each other — investing intentionally in the hard conversations that reveal us as complex and caring human beings.
We’ve learned what that takes. We know that, at the core, trust is the lubricant that propels human connection.
We’re the team behind The Dinner Party, The People’s Supper, Workplace Resilience, and a slew of projects and partnerships in communities across the country. Since 2014, we’ve helped build transformative connections and relationships among young people who have lost loved ones; in communities riven by politics; in schools traumatized by the loss of a student.
Our toolset, informed by those experiences and the people in those communities, allows people to talk about the things that matter most. It helps participants with diverse identities and experiences move through their mistrust and misgivings, allowing them to ask: What’s the thing that needs naming here? What are the barriers to engagement? How has our community tried to resolve these issues before? Which values resonate, and with whom? And to share stories that provide the foundation for understanding and repair.
These exchanges are not a panacea. They don’t inoculate against grief, or polarization, or futility. But those moments in which we truly connect with each other matter. They move us from isolation to association, and toward a shared humanity. Their absence diminishes us.
Our hardest conversations are the ones that matter most. Let’s talk.
Our Work in Action
