Philadelphia's Secret Ingredient for More Civic Engagement: a Lot of Food

You know those corporate retreats, where people from different departments in a company get together for breakout events, brainstorming sessions, and a lot of eating and drinking? Imagine something like that, but for an entire city. You’d get On the Table, a one-day civic blitz put on by the Knight Foundation that uses meal sharing as a way to cook up civic dialogue.

The first On the Table event was started in Chicago by Chicago Community Trust in 2014, and has returned every May since; the Knight Foundation has now spread the franchise to 30 communities nationwide. “On the Table is a pretty simple idea: It’s how do we get people to break bread together and then have solutions-oriented conversation about the community that they live in,” said Lilly Weinberg, the Knight Foundation’s program director of community and national initiatives. The program is part of a wave of similarly conceived philanthropic efforts aimed at busting Americans out of their ideological bubbles and salving the nation’s fractious political culture.“At a time where our country is incredibly divided, there’s really been a hunger for in-person, face-to-face conversations,” Weinberg said. “What we’ve found is that, at a hyperlocal level, what really matters is figuring out how to solve the challenges around us.”