Decibel Hosts First Rundberg Dinner Club

This week the Decibel team hosted its first Rundberg Dinner Club, a community social event where residents can meet their neighbors, try delicious local food, and garner a stronger sense of community.

The idea originated from a meeting with the Rundberg Sounding Board. The Sounding Board is a group of residents who provide feedback and ideas for our reporting project. One member suggested creating an event that was open to anyone in the area as a way to get to know each other better. We thought that was a fantastic suggestion. Part of our mission is to invest in each community we’re working in, and that means visiting and listening to people as much as we can. This felt like a great way to make something based on direct feedback from residents.

We had three goals with this first meeting:

• Successfully create a new community event
• Gather more story ideas from attendees
• Leave attendees with a stronger sense of community

We were thrilled that Marimba’s Bakery & Cafe was interested in hosting our first event. We had met the owners while working on a previous story (which was another Sounding Board suggestion!) and had kept in touch with them. When we told them about the Dinner Club, they were excited to share their space, their food and their time. Manager Ronaldo Alvarez was kind enough to do a short Q&A with our group about his mother’s dream of owning a restaurant, how they’re crafting traditional Guatemalan food with home-grown ingredients, and how they create the massive, kaleidoscopic kites that cover the ceiling.

Attendees enjoy food at Marimba's Guatemalan Bakery & Cafe.

We had 13 attendees out of 20 RSVP’s–that’s a 65% attendance rate. From those attendees we received 14 story ideas, more than one per person. Suggestions ranged from food trucks to profile, to stories on gun safety in the area.

We also asked attendees about community. When they checked in, we asked them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how connected they felt to Rundberg. At the end of the event and in a follow-up email, we asked them to again rate how connected they felt to the area. All respondents' numbers went up by more than one point on average, after just this one event.

We feel like we successfully hit our goals, but more importantly, we were thrilled to join with neighbors and break bread–quite literally–with folks from the community. Our work centers on partnering with communities to share authentic stories based on lived experiences. What better way to build that trust than through food?

We hope this is just the first of more Dinner Clubs. Have a suggestion on where we should go next? Let us know!