Starting a dinner club

A couple of months ago, I was feeling overwhelmed by various negative things going on in the world. I was reading a lot in the news about sexism and violence towards women, and was also feeling frustrated by injustices I observed in my own life. I felt really tired at the thought of trying to change things for the better. It just seemed like such an uphill battle. I mentioned this to one of my close friends. It turned out she was feeling the same way.

So we came up with an idea. Why don’t we start something that brings people together to talk about this stuff? A gathering that’s not setting out to change the world, but where we can talk freely about the things that are bothering us. A space where we can support each other and build a nice, warm community.

That’s where the idea was born: a Feminist Dinner Club.

We made a Facebook event and invited people we knew who we thought might be interested. It felt scary because neither of us had ever done something like this before. It was an experiment, and we were so nervous that no one would turn up!

When the evening came around, many people arrived. We gathered around a small dinner table sharing pots of rice and curry. We met new people who had similar interests and values to us. We talked about the things that made us angry. We also talked about reasons for hope. We laughed a lot. At the end of the evening, some of the attendees offered to host feminist dinners of their own.

When it was over, I felt nourished by the experience. I felt ready to go out and face the world.

The Feminist Dinner Club proved to me that it is important to have a sense of community in your life. Often, we trudge through life alone, never admitting that we feel overwhelmed or isolated.

These days, especially in cities, people are less connected to religious, family, or cultural communities than they might have been in the past. So it’s up to us to find little pockets of community that we fit into, or to create our own.