A Feast of Ideas
(Page 4 of 5)
November / December 2007
by J. Trout Lowen
A few weeks later, the couple hosted a dinner and dialogue to discuss a local author’s new book. Word spread. Over the next couple of years they blew through their savings hosting dinners to feed their need for connection and conversation.
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Then a nonprofit philanthropic organization asked them to design an event to help its mostly white board members connect better with those it helps, most of whom are people of color. It was their first paid event, and the first time they began to think of Marnita’s Table as a business. Now, in addition to social networking dinners, they organize corporate team-building events and host dinners to introduce newly hired people of color to the community.
After the original HIV/AIDS discussion, DIVA Minnesota, a fund-raising and grant-making organization, asked Schroedl and Goldstein to convene three dinner conversations focused on community-based solutions for stemming the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS among women of color, who in 2006 represented 68 percent of the state’s new HIV infections.
The dinners took place over six weeks, and within a few months 60 individuals from 27 organizations had joined together and signed the DIVA Collaborative, a plan to reach out to and educate women of color about HIV/AIDS.
Despite the size and complexity of the group, the experience was intensely personal, says DIVA’s Mike Cassidy, “because you’re in a very intimate atmosphere, and people are interested in what you think, not what your organization thinks.”
The result, says Peter Carr, head of the Minnesota Health Department’s sexually transmitted diseases and HIV section, was a surprising spirit of collaboration and cooperation. Too often, he says, organizations trying to work together end up competing as each tries to protect its interests and its turf.
“It was wonderful, a really refreshing perspective,” Carr marvels.
One key to their success, say Goldstein and Schroedl, is cultivating participants from across the economic, political, and cultural spectrum.
“It’s about making sure that you’re really inclusive and inviting the right players, not just people you know,” Schroedl says.
Specifically, they try to make sure that at least half the participants are people of color and half are people living below the poverty line. This is important, Goldstein says, “because if you have 30 white people and 5 black people or other people of color, that’s an entirely different experience. . . . In fact, for whites to be in a room where they are in the minority is a very powerful experience.”
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