On Covenants, Valleys, and Real Relationships:
Seven Lessons on Building Community in the Age of Isolation
What’s driving social isolation right now, and what can we do to fix it? Why does it so often take grief and loss to get us to heed the things that truly matter? At a time in which the word “community” is so overused to the point of being meaningless, what really is its value, and what does it take to build deep relationships that last? How do we fund decentralized networks, and how do we measure impact?
Earlier this month, we sat down with New York Times columnist, David Brooks, and our partners at the Ittleson Foundation and The Palette Fund, for a lunch and conversation that touched on each of those questions, and more. We were joined by a few dozen folks in media, philanthropy, and civic innovation, at NYC’s Spanish Benevolent Society — in the same room where, four years earlier, we’d held our launch event, and where, four years before that, Carla’s family held the reception following her dad’s funeral service.
Read on for seven (yup: two more than five, three less than ten) key takeaways.
1. Social isolation is the crisis underlying a lot of other crises.
“We’ve become a society that’s really good at opening ourselves up, and really bad at tying ourselves down,” says David. The result, he says, is an emerging crisis of social isolation. For proof, he rattled off a series of stats: “In 1980, 20% of Americans said they felt lonely. Now it’s 40%. Thirty-five percent of people over 45 say they’re chronically lonely. Eight percent of people in America say they have meaningful conversations with their neighbors.”
The problem is particularly acute among younger generations. “It’s become phenomenally hard to be in your mid-20s,” says David. The American suicide rate has increased markedly in the last 15 years: For young people, it is the third leading cause of death. In a recent study, millennials and members of Gen Z ages 18–22 reported higher loneliness scores than those of any other age demographic, including people 72 and older. In a study by researchers at Brigham Young University study examining data from 3.4 million people, those who were lonely, living alone, or socially isolated had a significantly higher risk of premature death: an effect that, notably, was most pronounced among the young.
Endemic loneliness and isolation have been accompanied by a steady rise in alienation and, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, a decline in institutional trust, and a “loss of a sense of purpose” — what David calls a “telos crisis.” The combined result, he says, has “left people naked and alone. And when you leave people naked and alone, they do what their evolutionary sources tell them to do, which is that they revert to tribe. So we’ve seen a rise of tribalism, both across partisan lines, across racial lines, across immigrant vs native lines. [T]ribalism is based on a desperate attempt to form community based on hatred.”
2. Don’t fear the valley.
“When I talk to people over 70, one of the things I often notice is that their lives take [on] a certain shape, which I’ve come to think of as the two mountain shape,” began David, kicking off his keynote. “[T]hey get out of school and they think they have a certain mountain to climb, which usually involves their career, building their family, and they climb that mountain. And they either get to the top of that mountain and find it kind of unsatisfying, or they fall off that mountain — they get fired, or else something really bad happens, like the loss of a loved one. And they fall into the valley.
And the paradox of the valley is that vision is clearer sometimes at the bottom than it is at the top…[W]hat suffering does is it carves through the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity below that, and then it carves through that floor and reveals a cavity below that. And you realize that the only thing that can fill those cavities is spiritual food, not materialism. So people decide then, ‘Well, that first mountain that I thought was my mountain, that actually wasn’t my mountain. There’s a second mountain up ahead.’ Their life pivots…Sometimes it happens when you’re 60, sometimes when you’re 30, but it strikes me as just this very common pattern. Sometimes that’s the saving grace for society, because the second mountain tends to be about pouring forth love to other things.”
Amen to that.
As a community of 20- and 30-somethings navigating loss and life after, we’ve met a lot of people who’ve dwelled in the valley, some for years. Their capacity to return to the valley with eyes wide open, their commitment to holding the hands of friends still there, and their second-mountain-climbing feats are daily inspiration.
We’ve been profoundly lucky to work alongside others who’ve been there too. The Dinner Party owes its survival, in part, to Terrence Meck, founder of The Palette Fund and one of the event’s hosts (and the panel’s moderator). It was his journey through the valley, and climb up Mountain #2 that led him to start The Palette Fund. On the morning Terrence turned 30, his husband, Rand, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died just four months later.
“Much of my life — and a lot of my work — since losing Rand has been not just around creating The Palette Fund and honoring his life and legacy. It’s really been figuring out what it was like loving a man like Rand, losing a man like Rand, and then moving on with my life after that great loss. Learning how not just to live with such a drastic loss — and sometimes indescribable grief — ended up being one of the biggest challenges that I faced in those early years of forming this foundation.”
3. Want to know if something’s working? Build relationships with the people you’re serving.
“The problem of metrics is a tyrannical problem,” says Brooks. “We’ve got to figure out what metrics are useful for and what they’re not useful for. Relationships obviously defy metrics.”
We’re regularly asked how we know if The Dinner Party is working. The answer isn’t survey data. We occasionally ask people to fill out surveys, and most forget, or else check a series of boxes that don’t really tell us much. But it’s also inherently unreliable: Survey data only tells you about the people who fill out the survey. If you want honest and thoughtful feedback in real time, the better strategy is simply: Ask.
When something’s going wrong, people won’t always come out and say it; they’ll simply ghost. We check-in regularly with each host one-on-one, and hear about what’s working and what’s not. We can spot the difference between tables that are struggling with attendance for reasons outside their control — busy schedules, or distance, or too few members, or simply because people have gotten the value they needed from it — and those that are struggling because something’s not working. Both are fixable sets of problems, but they require different forms of troubleshooting.
4. The key to scaling relationship-driven networks? Grow the number of relationship-holders.
“Souls are not saved in bundles,” says David, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson. That “relationships are built one at a time” is “inescapable,” he says. So how, then, do you scale?
Most people assume that growth comes at the expense of relationships: It’s easy to be high-touch when you’re serving 100 people; it’s harder when you’re serving 10,000. After all, experts say the average person can maintain just 150 social relationships at any one time. So it would follow that if you want to remain highly relational, you have to stay hyper-local and relatively small. If you want to scale, you have to give up relational depth. In other words, systems and technology can’t replace human relationships.
From the beginning, every person who’s reached out to join a table has received a personal message from someone within our team, and where possible, been hand-matched to a nearby table (nearly 8K inquiries and 4K+ matches and counting). But as word spread, we faced a challenge: Demand outstripped supply. We couldn’t keep up with growth. Rather than automate systems and processes, or cut back on the coaching we do with each host, we sought a cost-effective way to expand our capacity. We recruited a group of paid Regional Organizers from within our host network, whose job is to serve as liaisons between Dinner Party staff and the cities where we consistently see the most demand. Those organizers serve as our eyes and ears on the ground, grabbing coffee with local hosts and organizing happy hours, matching would-be Dinner Partiers to tables, based on a combination of factors ranging from neighborhood, to type of loss, age, interests, and shared identities. Rather than match each new submission one-at-a-time to the next available seat, we handle all of our matching over the course of one week each month, allowing us to build up a backlog and to curate entire tables.
We’re also in the process of building a new tech platform. We originally envisioned it as a tool to “get out of the way” of Dinner Partiers finding one another, forming tables, and Partying away into the sunset. But as our work has evolved, so has the role of technology. The original idea of the platform was to remove us as the middlemen, both to increase capacity for other things and out of a belief that people are their own best judges of who they want to connect with. But we’re actually moving away from that. We’ve found that that first touch-point — a personal email coming from an actual human being, introducing you to a host — is really important to getting a person bought in and committed to actually showing up. So even with the new platform, every person who reaches out to join will receive an email from a member of our team with a recommendation for a table (or a couple of tables) we think they’d particularly like. Other reasons the platform will be invaluable include having all of our data in one, centralized place.
5. Today’s new organisms require new funding streams.
Too often, we mistake leader-full organizations as being leaderless. We believe that communities build themselves, and assume that movements just happen: that someone created a hashtag, and poof, a movement was born.
At its most extreme, the constant under-resourcing of those organizations comes at the highest possible price, particularly for people of color and others who live with the daily effects of marginalization. The death of Erica Garner to a heart attack at the age of 27, and the high incidence of premature death among leading Black Lives Matter activists, stand as heartbreaking reminders of the costs of unrelenting stress, financial insecurity, and secondary trauma borne by many of those on the frontlines of today’s social justice movements.
Today’s most effective leaders must be effective enablers: effective champions, effective tool developers, effective switchboard operators. Choosing to build a decentralized network means you have to cede control to the people on the ground. It means creating spaces rather than providing services. It means quickly responding to shifting realities and changing demand, and having the capacity to be nimble, without the luxury of designing in a laboratory. There’s a certain kind of risk-taking that comes with that, which can make a lot of funders understandably uncomfortable. But adequately resourcing new organisms like The Dinner Party is essential to their sustainability and demands we change what we choose to take seriously.
6. We need covenants, not contracts.
As we move away from traditional institutions and toward more peer-driven communities, we need a new type of stitching to hold us in relationship to one another — and it isn’t a contract between a service provider and a client. It’s a covenant.
“A contract is something you enter into for your own self-interested reasons,” David says. “But a covenant is something you enter into because the relationship is more important than you are. A contract serves your purpose, but a covenant transforms who you are.”
We treat the creation of a “low barrier to entry” as the holy grail for most digital design, failing to recognize its cost: We sign-up on event sites with a few clicks, and don’t think twice when we flake the day of. We don’t know if the typist on the other side of a customer service chat room is a human or a robot, so we don’t bother taking the time to abide by the golden rule. We count likes and shares as meaningful interactions, and scratch our heads at our persistent loneliness. We use the word “community” to describe our Quality Assurance or customer service departments, but continue to treat customers as one-dimensional consumers, with no real agency or decision-making authority. Using the word — without embracing a way of being that is mutually supportive — does not a community make.
Relationships aren’t made in fine print. Naming our boundaries and commitments to one another isn’t the stuff of Terms & Conditions: It’s about agreeing to a set of principles about how we’re choosing to be with one another. It’s about living into our values, rather than merely giving them lip service.
Earlier this year, we sat down to write our own covenant, reflecting back on eight years as a community — on what’s worked and what hasn’t, as we navigated our embryonic and tantrum-y toddler years and our angsty teenage phase. We reflected on what’s felt good and sustainable, and what hasn’t, and what we aspire to be like with one another. It guides how our staff chooses to interact, and the way we approach difficult conversations, and it’s something we’ve begun to ask of every person entering our community.
7. Meet people where they are.
“We’ve learned over the years, if you want to do something effective in mental health, you really don’t use the phrase mental health. Stealth activity is the best way to meet people where they are when they need support,” says Tony Wood, Executive Director of the Ittleson Foundation and one of the day’s hosts.
We’ve been told that referring to our community as “Dinner Partiers” means we won’t be taken seriously. But that thinking — and our reliance on institutional frameworks and language — is the problem. We’re often approached by traditional grief support agencies, looking to understand how we’re getting 20- and 30-somethings to show up. They have programmatic mandates to serve millennials, but can’t get them through the door. We have more signing up than we can manage. What gives?
We use a visual and verbal language that’s native to millennials — closer to the experience of an underground supper club than a support group in a church basement. Our success to date has been born, in no small part, out of our ability to use the “we” pronoun: nearly eight years since our first dinner, we remain a community of peers. Every member of our staff and every volunteer has experienced loss firsthand. We’re not a program serving “other,” or a group of amateur psychotherapists; we’re peers creating the same community we want to be a part of.
However different all of our stories are, we’ve found just about all of us believe we’re alone. As Ellen Goodman, a role model of ours and the founder of The Conversation Project, puts it, we’re all participating in a “mutual conspiracy of silence.” Want to end the conspiracy? Create a setting, experience, and identity that people aren’t embarrassed to talk about with friends, or on the internet.
About the authors: Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez are cofounders of The Dinner Party, a community of more than 4,000 mostly 20- and 30-somethings who’ve each experienced a major death loss, and meet regularly over potluck dinner parties to share the stories and reflections, to turn loss from a conversation-stopper to a conversation-starter, with the goal of transforming our most isolating experiences into sources of meaningful connection and forward movement.
