You're invited to a bipartisan dinner in Appalachia

Dear Readers,

It’s not a typical scene in America these days: a former campaigner for Hillary Clinton sits down with a raucous crowd of kids and Trump-supporting adults to eat dinner and sing karaoke every Thursday evening in a storefront in small-town Appalachia. 

The genesis of this gathering stems back to 2016, when Dottie Fromal came by bus to Nelsonville, Ohio to visit some old college friends after returning from doing volunteer work in Tanzania. Arriving on a Friday, she attended the town’s renowned music festival that weekend, and never left. 

Sometimes known as “that Hillary girl,” a nickname that arose years ago when she knocked on doors as a volunteer for the Clinton campaign, Dottie now works running an afterschool drop-in program in the center of town. As she got to know the kids who came by for a snack or to play games, Dottie learned that many of them had never sat down to a table for dinnertime. Most had very little adult supervision, and often ate alone, on a couch or bed – some of them didn’t even have a table. Most of their homes had no running water, because their families couldn’t afford the utility bills.

This town is one of many towns in Appalachia that was targeted for more than a decade by large pharmaceutical companies seeking a market for their highly addictive pain medications. During a six year period, more than 6.3 million pills were dispensed at three tiny pharmacies in Nelsonville alone (population 5,000).

This travesty wreaked destruction on a community that already has endured high poverty levels dating back to the Johnson administration. Opioid addiction has killed many of the town’s residents, destroying futures, leaving parentless children in the care of grandparents, and exacerbating already existing class divisions.

Dottie decided to invite the children at the after school center to stay for a sit-down spaghetti dinner one evening. She started the meal by asking the kids to share something positive that had happened during the week. The 12 kids who attended loved it.

The next week, she invited more kids. 20 showed up. As the weeks passed and more kids showed up, they began asking for food to bring home – not for themselves but for their parents, grandparents or other family members. Dottie told them to invite their families.

Soon there were more than 50 people coming to dinner every Thursday night. People started offering to help cook. People from the First Presbyterian Church began to chip in. A chef from a nearby vocational high school took on the role of meal planning. One week, the firehouse invited everyone over, another week everyone met at the park. The dinner quickly became an intergenerational affair, with attendees ranging in age from newborn to 85 years old. 

Some people began showing up two hours early -- it was their social event of the week. In Nelsonville, like most places in America, there is a lot of stigma around being low-income, and families that have been hit hard by addiction are treated as unwelcome members of society. Several of the regulars at the community dinner have said it’s the only public place where they feel truly welcome. 

The dinner comes together each week “through a miracle,” says Dottie. With the meal regularly attracting 150 to 250 people, it costs money in a place where money is scarce. But through private donations, online fundraisers, and donations from a number of local organizations, a meal is set on the table each week. 

There is usually karaoke, too, and because people are going through a lot, “sometimes the singing will bring tears to your eyes,” says Lori Crook, one of the volunteers and dinner attendees who moved to Nelsonville from New York City a number of years ago to be closer to her father.

Lori says that people at the dinner pour out their hearts to one another about what's going on in their lives, sometimes over the karaoke mic, sometimes in hushed whispers. At times, there are tears. Occasionally a fight breaks out among the middle schoolers, she says, then gets resolved. But mostly there are hugs, camaraderie, and loyalty to one another. 

There’s no denying that Lori and Dottie have had a different kind of life than their neighbors, many of whose families have been here for generations. Dottie says that sometimes people want to chat with her about Hillary’s emails and tell her how wrong she was for supporting her. 

She also remembers a time when some elderly women came to her very upset after seeing some anti-Trump posters in her window, wondering how she could be disrespectful of the president. Dottie recalls that their feeling was that “Trump was the epitome of a strong man - and that he was just doing what men do.” 

It was hard for her to hear, she says, but rather than close people down when differences in political viewpoints arise, she invites them inside and they have coffee and engage on other topics. By doing this and not shutting them off, Dottie has found it opens up the chance for a new dialogue.

Despite differing viewpoints, Lori has found that people have a lot more in common than the national conversation implies. She notes that many of us simply don't know any people who are low-income or have a different kind of life than we do. In her experience, it’s surprisingly easy to cut through perceived political divisions by just listening and talking in a human way.  

The community dinner has done more than feed people or facilitate conversation. It’s also been generative. Feeling that they are part of a community has empowered many of the young people who attend -- they are coming together and learning how to organize to improve the circumstances their community has been facing for decades. 

McCray Powell, a local man in his 20s, said that attending the dinner when he was between jobs inspired him to start volunteering to help with the meal, and later do other community activism. When four of the polling stations around Nelsonville were slated to close, McCray and a few other organizers succeeded in preventing that from happening.

Dottie has kept up the tradition of sharing everyone’s positive news of the week before dinner. “Some share that they have new jobs, new apartments,” she notes, adding that one woman was particularly proud one week because she had finally gotten dentures. “It’s just an intimate, personal thing, yet here she had this trusted family to share this personal victory with.”

Most of all, the dinner brings people together through a sense of shared humanity. Everyone is encouraged to feel that they have a say in what happens with the dinner. The grandmothers love serving the food or cleaning up -- it gives them a sense of authority and value. 

Dottie knows that she is still an outsider – even if you’ve lived 20 years in the town you can be seen that way. Yet by volunteering, working hard, looking each other in the eye, listening, and just showing up consistently, this group of people so different from each other on the surface have together started a revolution in this small town.

The results have been astounding. People feel empowered, knowing that when they come together they can make an impact. Pride is coming back to the community. And people are really listening to each other.

It's amazing what a big pot (or pots!) of spaghetti and the commitment of a few people working together can do. Sitting across a table, singing a song together, bouncing each other’s kids on our knees quashes all tribalism. Human connection creates the greatest change of all.

“What I'm trying to get at,” says Lori at the end of our conversation, “is that the dinner is revolutionary because it practices radical hospitality, radical equality, and the result is radical acceptance, and solidarity.”

People so different rarely come together in our country anymore. This weekly community dinner in the poorest county in Ohio shows us what can happen when they do.

If you would like to chip in to help the Nelsonville community keep their dinners going (which have now moved to delivery service during the Covid-19 crisis), you can donate here or with Venmo here.

What we’re reading this week...

Lord of the Flies was a book so ubiquitous in most of our high school curriculums, the story of the dark side of human nature has come to be accepted nearly as a fact. This beautiful tale of a real-life Lord of the Flies tells a different kind of story, though - one “of friendship and loyalty, one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.”

Most of us have now heard the tragic story of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, but the only reason we did is because someone brought this untold story to light by releasing a video. But a man’s murder should not have to be televised for a crime to be brought to justice. This article asks the very valid question: how many other injustices have we missed?

We encourage you to share this newsletter with people you know, so that we can expand our reach and help those in vulnerable communities get their voices heard.

And more stories, from a reader…

Resilience is a character trait that we’re all learning to cultivate during this pandemic. Unsung reader Rebecca Weaver shared with us her story of facing off a different kind of disease as the Covid-19 crisis has unfolded. Read more about her journey here (and check out her innovative HR startup that aims to change the way human resources departments deal with problems in the workplace.)

That’s Unsung for this week! We look forward to hearing from all of you, with any reader responses, tips, or unsung stories of your own to share. Reply to this email to get in touch.

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-The team at Lioness