Bring-Thing Dinners
Mt Caz has been hosting a monthly series of dinners, initiated by Christina’s desire for casual gatherings that are easy to attend and open to the community. Christina has always had a penchant for regular meal gatherings, having had a tradition of Sunday dinners with her parents’ group of friends and their kids, immigrants who found families in each other after fleeing their home country.
In a conversation with Avery Alder at Big Bad Con 2019, she mentioned that she does community dinners in her small. But they aren’t potlucks -- the organizers provide basic food and childcare for everyone, so it the barrier of entry is really low. This idea sparked something in us, and we started a format for a monthly community dinner in November 2019.
These are the suggestions we offer people:
Bring something to share! This can be anything: You could bring flowers, or extra dishware (sometimes we run out), or be the DJ for the night, or read a poem, or hang a painting on the wall, or hand out party favors. You can bring a friend we've never met, or bring your fantastic presence. It can also be food We all contribute in different ways.
We will provide some vegetarian dishes, and if it turns out we need more, we'll make more, or order something, or eat more of staples this time and adjust the recipes later.
We'll make time during the evening to acknowledge the land, make announcements, share performances, and celebrate or commiserate as necessary. Let us know if you want some of that space.
We try to do this once a month, possibly rotating locations. Maybe you'll want to host next time! But if you're out of town or can’t make it, there'll be another. Hope to see you there.
You are invited, and we want you to come even if you have nothing to bring materially. Let us make space for each other.
Sometimes we include an additional mini-events on top of it, like a pantry swap where we bring items from the back of our cabinets that haven’t gotten used for a long time, and folks can share them with each other to inspire new meals!
In my vision of it, these can become gatherings where a community of friends, and their friends, and also the neighbors, and maybe a stranger or two, can walk into a warm place, find some nourishment, and treat a place like what my cooperative house felt like in college after dinners -- a comfortable space to spread out and do your thing, which could be reading zines on the couch, or setting up a board game, or discussing direct action, or starting a collaborative art project. This may be a cornerstone event of the distributed coop village.
If you want to see when the next one is happening, send us a message or sign up for the Yodel, our monthly email announcement.
