Building Community, One Meal and Conversation at a Time

By way of daily habits of squeezing in lunch at a food truck or munching that last bite of cereal before embarking on the morning commute, food can feel predictably functional. Fast-paced culture does not often reward the intentional practice of breaking bread with others.

Through the Conversations for Community and Dinners Across Differences programs, the University is making its own effort to disrupt this pattern. Or, at least, to make the Penn community more aware of how food can serve as a conduit to dialogue.

“I’m always bringing food into my classes, asking students to meet out for coffee, and I think involving food in conversations is such a profound, yet subtle, way of saying we’re human, we both eat, and providing a grounding environment to have a conversation,” says Leigh Llewellyn Graham, a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education and cultural anthropologist. “I try to do it all the time.”

Conversations for Community, which launched alongside the Dinners Across Differences program this spring, provides funds from the Office of the Provost to dine with 4-8 people at Houston Market, Joe’s Café, or Pret a Manger with a $15 voucher, or at 1920 Commons for the “all you care to eat” option. Applicants—who can be faculty, students, postdocs, or staff with a valid Penn ID—should include a short paragraph with a topic they plan to explore.

Dinners Across Differences, meanwhile, similarly allocates funds to support group conversations over a meal but is administered by each participating school. Graham organized a Conversations for Community dinner with a group of advisees and other GSE students to discuss an April New Yorker article about how Chinese students experience America. She described it as a “rich conversation starter” that jumpstarted discussions across the table.

Graham emphasizes that providing food for others is a “gesture of care” and part of teaching with love, described by cultural critic and theorist bell hooks. “bell hooks is someone who says love has to be part of your teaching, part of your research, and not only part of it but the foundation of our pedagogy,” Graham says. “If you’re talking about nourishing people in a loving way, then food should be on the table—no pun intended.”

Charles “Chaz” Howard, University chaplain and vice president for social equity and community, says the programs came to be during discussions about how Penn could leverage already existing resources to bring people together programmatically. The Campaign for Community program, for example, was launched in 2015 and issues small grants to create events on campus that can bring different types of people together; ideas range from speaker events to performing arts shows. These two new programs and initiatives, he says, were born out of that same spirit.

Howard noted that the programs are also helpful in connecting students who may frequently cross paths but not have much reason to stop for conversation in the hallways. “One can go for years without seeing someone who’s in the same school and is a colleague … a program like this, [it’s about] stopping and slowing down to have dinner with someone to help it feel like a small community, which I think is encouraging,” Howard says. Having “four brains and four hearts” at a table, he adds, allows for people to be more vulnerable. “It might be easier to have hard conversations as a small group than the pressure that’s there with a one-on-one,” Howard says.

At Weitzman, Catherine Seavitt, chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, engaged the Dinners Across Differences opportunity as part of her role in the program’s Design Justice Working Group. That committee, she says, had already been thinking about “how to get more touchpoints with students” and more qualitative information from students around topics of equity, in addition to information they were receiving through regular surveys. One conversation that faculty and students agreed would be fruitful was about inclusive teaching and studio pedagogy. That conversation became one of three dinners held in the spring semester, typically including two faculty members and involving a short text assigned to spark discussion.

“I think what was really nice is it didn’t feel like a seminar; it was more lively and open. We got to hear more about how great it was for our first-year grad students to meet third-years they’d never met even though their studios are all on the same floor in Meyerson Hall,” says Seavitt. “I think we built a lot of trust, and if that’s the goal, we got there on many levels,” she adds.

Kelvin Vu, a dual degree graduate student studying architecture and landscape architecture in the Weitzman School, who learned about the dinners through a weekly newsletter, participated in the dinner about pedagogy. (He says he’s also participated in the Penn Mentor Meals program.) His goal was to bring the topic of what it means to teach, along with pedagogical development in his departments, to the forefront of the conversation. That dinner included Seavitt and Rashida Ng, the undergraduate architecture chair; the two asked students to read an excerpt from hooks’ “Teaching to Transgress.” He described the dinner as “more intimate” and more transparent than other settings. “It felt like the start of something,” Vu says. “There were some conversations that just started—there’s only so much you can do [in one dinner]—but I think it’s a really lovely way to get to know people who I didn’t know so well before, even though we’re in the same school, and open up those conversations.”

Read the full story in Penn Today.