On a current Tuesday on the Trinity Group Commons’ weekly meal in East Nashville, a lady named Angie Duncan sliced a donated loaf of sourdough for dinner. She wore a beanie glowing with tiny Christmas lights. “I received that hat at bingo,” her husband Jimmy mentioned. He’d performed the sport throughout city at Room In The Inn, a longtime useful resource middle and shelter for Nashville’s unhoused group. It’s the place the pair met earlier than their marriage ceremony this yr, which additionally happened at Room In The Inn.
In the meantime, pans of pasta carbonara and salad have been carried in, scratch-made at The Nashville Meals Venture kitchens with donated substances from native farmers and butchers. A neighbor named Peggy Frank sliced her do-it-yourself candy potato pies. She brings a few them each week. One other couple introduced a casserole dish of grits. On the finish of the desk, Meshach Adams poured glasses of tea. Dwelling for the vacations from grad college at Alabama A&M, the place he research city planning, Adams had been an everyday at this meal for about two years earlier than heading off to grad college. He discovered about it whereas engaged on a pedestrian security plan alongside Dickerson Pike with nonprofit group Stroll Bike Nashville and returned to see associates at what was as soon as a part of the rhythm of his life.
“Tuesday, 4:30 p.m? Come right here,” Adams says of his routine. “This can be a microcosm of what the world needs to be like.”
This microcosm consists of an eclectic mixture of neighbors, and blurred traces between helpers and people in want, between “volunteers” and “recipients,” the place differing teams don’t stand on reverse sides of a desk. Right here, everybody serves and receives, and everybody sits to eat collectively, recurrently, for a neighborhood bounty within the firm of group.
“Crucial half is you meet your neighbors,” says Zach Lykins, govt director at Trinity Group Commons. The meals is an enormous draw, sure, however it’s additionally a group useful resource trade that occurs solely from folks realizing each other in a constant manner.
“When you have a useful resource to share or a necessity, come discuss to me,” Lykins tells the group. He lives in Cleveland Park and initially got here to the meal as a visitor with a buddy. Now he retains observe of wants on a whiteboard in the back of the room.
The dinner at Trinity Group Commons shouldn’t be new. It’s been occurring for greater than a decade. However might or not it’s a mannequin for related dinners round city sooner or later? Some native — and nationwide — teams have taken an curiosity in group meals of late.
Meals — its price, its shortage for some — has been on the minds of many. On the nationwide stage, of us debated the worth of eggs. “I received on groceries — quite simple phrase, groceries,” President-Elect Donald Trump advised Meet the Press not too long ago. And but economists say Trump’s tariffs might drive up the worth of products. Teams just like the Tennessee Justice Heart are bracing for potential will increase in meals insecurity by internet hosting webinars about important cuts to the Supplemental Vitamin Help Program (SNAP) and different advantages.
All this might make dinners just like the one at Trinity extra important — not simply within the sharing of meals, but additionally within the sharing of group care amid what Surgeon Normal Vivek H. Murthy final yr described as an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” (Murthy’s workplace not too long ago hosted a potluck to encourage group and launched a handbook for hosts known as Recipes for Connection.) In Nashville, the notions of realizing and higher understanding one’s neighbors and strengthening the material of group have bubbled up throughout a bitterly divided election season when some have felt a need to seek out hyper-local connection.
For instance, Think about Nashville, a 14-month group engagement venture with enter from 10,000 locals, included suggestions to foster belonging and community-building inside neighborhoods. Black Psychological Well being Village would possibly host extra group dinners on the heels of its Friendsgiving. FeedBack Nashville, a group initiative to think about a extra simply and sustainable meals future, recognized — primarily based on a whole lot of interviews and surveys — strengthening social material and various “third areas” as one in every of its six pathways. The Metro Human Relations Fee will launch dinners known as No Hate on My Plate in 2025.
“Once we’re in group, we’re much less remoted,” mentioned the Rev. Kate Fields of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel in an announcement about No Hate on My Plate on the Tennessee Native Meals Summit in early December. “We belief one another extra. We begin to see one another as an alternative of see previous one another. I believe that we develop into resilient in our variations. … Individuals consuming and laughing and speaking and constructing relationships — that is the sort of world I wish to dwell in. I’m satisfied the desk is that avenue.”
Members at a workshop for FeedBack Nashville convened Sunday to debate subsequent steps in its six pathways. The workshop drew about 30 folks from numerous fields (training, housing, transportation, meals) who cut up into smaller teams, every specializing in one pathway. A bunch digging into the subject of group meals included Lykins, a pair staff and a board member from The Nashville Meals Venture, in addition to Kamilah Sanders from Larger Than Equal, a state IT worker named Shalini Gupta, and Carson Bolding from B Corp, an organization that measures social influence.
“If one thing like that had existed after I first moved right here,” Bolding mentioned, “I believe I’d’ve felt much more linked to my group, safer strolling round my neighborhood, and extra at house.”
The group mentioned what extra group meals might appear like. Repeatedly occurring outside pop-ups on metropolis streets with tents and tables for higher visibility? A device equipment for neighborhood associations on street-permitting and gathering assets for dinners? Figuring out designated meal leaders with deep and different connections inside every neighborhood?
Might these meals — the group questioned — develop into an figuring out and common a part of life, like the selection of church or membership or gymnasium?
“Wouldn’t or not it’s cool,” requested Marcie Smeck Bryant, a board member at The Nashville Meals Venture and an everyday participant at Trinity, “if folks have been saying, ‘What group meal do you go to?’”
Disclosure: Jennifer Justus beforehand labored for The Nashville Meals Venture. She left the group in 2021.
