“This is not an idea we just came up with. We were asked for it. And it’s worked,” says Penny Elsley, founding director of joiningthedots, a grass-roots movement for social change committed to seeing “communities become fully alive to the interconnections which lead to a meaningful, sustainable life for the earth and its inhabitants”.
The project evolved out of hearing from both newly arrived and established Australians that they were struggling to find ways to connect at a personal level. The aim of Welcome Dinners, then, is to create a platform for meaningful connection, sparking friendships between people of diverse cultures who are living in close proximity to one another but have not yet had a chance to meet.
Trained Welcome Dinner facilitators are present to lead the activities and offer support to the host. Each dinner has a mix of established Australians and newly arrived people from across the world – they could be migrants, refugees or people still seeking asylum here in Australia or international students currently studying in our universities and colleges.
“What better way to bring people together than over food?” says Ms Elsley. “Hospitality is something we all have in common. At these dinners, we connect people through their common humanity so we get beyond the usual, ‘Where do you work?’ and ‘Where do you come from?’ to things we have in common as human beings.” Ms Elsley has noticed, for example, that “Where do you work?” can be an intimidating question to ask a person who is not established yet, or who, like some asylum seekers living in the community, don’t have the right to work.
At each dinner, open to all and at no cost to participants, there are what Ms Elsley describes as “a few rituals” to break the ice and put the group of strangers at ease. The dinners are pot-luck. Every guest brings a dish representing their country or culture.
At the start, the facilitator will ask each guest to introduce their dish and explain why it is significant to them. “It’s an amazing process because from that, everyone has an insight into everyone else, and even the shy people have said something,” says Ms Elsley. “It opens the space in a beautiful way. And those people who have never stepped inside someone’s home in Australia before – never mind cooked for somebody else in this country before – get something from this that is really quite unique.”
In Sydney people tend to live in pockets. Suburbs, generally speaking, are divided into where established Australians live, and where other people live. Ms Elsley says language can exacerbate this. But the biggest barrier, she believes, is “fear of the other and of what we don’t know about the other”.
The project is run entirely by volunteers and is currently funded by two crowd-funding campaigns and some local council grants. But what the organisation really needs, says Ms Elsley, is corporate sponsorship.
“We’ve had an international student say: ‘For the first time I feel like I don’t miss my family.’ One refugee said, ‘This is the first time I feel free in this country.’ It’s just a dinner, but it means a lot to people.”
