Community Plate builds connections in Maine, one potluck supper at a time (2024)

On stage at the Freeport Harraseeket Grange on a mid-November Sunday night, Community Plate co-founder and emcee Karl Schatz introduces Nasser Rohani and his wife, Parivash, to the crowd gathered for one of Community Plate’s Story-Sharing Potluck Suppers.

The evening’s theme is “Setting the Table for Gratitude,” and the Rohanis are among five storytellers slated to address about 60 people, seated at long tables after a bountiful potluck meal. Nasser, a retired L.L.Bean programmer/analyst who has lived with his family in Maine for 40 years, prefaces their story with an observation about the term “from away,” a phrase Schatz suggested the storytellers avoid because it doesn’t foster inclusion.

Nasser Rohani asks the crowd – tongue firmly in cheek – that if “from away” applies even to people who come to Maine from neighboring states, what hope did he and his wife have, with their lilting Iranian accents. Charmed, the appreciative crowd chuckles.

Parivash interjects. “I have to tell you – and you believe me – we didn’t have accents until we came to Maine,” she says drily, drawing warm, hearty laughter.

With the room won over, Nasser begins. “The story we would like to share with you tonight is about how welcoming those of you who are from here have been with us. And we are so grateful for that.”

This is Community Plate’s 25th story-sharing potluck supper in the 18 months since Schatz and his wife, Margaret Hathaway, launched the nonprofit group in an effort to build community and combat loneliness statewide. Community Plate’s moveable feast has been held so far in 12 of Maine’s 16 counties, reaching as many as 700 people.

In 2023, just after Community Plate’s first event, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warned Americans of a “loneliness epidemic.” He said prolonged social isolation causes health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, increasing the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, dementia in older adults by 50%, and premature death in general by more than 60%.

This fall, Murthy’s office released a downloadable information kit called “Recipes for Connection,” offering tips for organizing and hosting food-based gatherings. Murthy asserts that events like potluck suppers can be a prescription to cure the loneliness epidemic.

Murthy’s findings came as no surprise to Schatz and Hathaway, who were spurred to start Community Plate’s supper series last year because they recognized the social disconnection around them, especially following the pandemic. But the Surgeon General’s warning has strengthened their resolve to continue their work, and reach all of Maine’s counties in 2025.

“As a culture, we are not getting together as often as most of us would like,” Hathaway said. “Getting together for a community potluck doesn’t seem like an essential thing, but it kind of is, because we see what happens when you don’t know the people around you.

“We really see this organization as a catalyst to encourage people to see it’s not that hard to get together,” she continued. “It’s pretty nice to make eye contact. It’s pretty nice to share recipes and stories about yourself and your family. It makes you feel heard and seen, which is what we all want.”

BRINGING COMMUNITY COOKBOOKS TO LIFE

The concept for Community Plate grew out of the community cookbook initiative Schatz and Hathaway started in 2019, with project partner Don Lindgren. Schatz, a photojournalist, and Hathaway, a writer, have published seven books together on food and farming. In 2020, with Lindgren, they put out the “Maine Bicentennial Community Cookbook,” featuring more than 200 recipes and family stories from a diverse collection of Mainers.

Moved in part by the success of that cookbook, and also by the isolation and social tension wrought by the pandemic, the team put out a follow-up in 2022, “Maine Community Cookbook, Vol. 2.”

“We saw Mainers from all walks of life side-by-side, together, in this cookbook,” Schatz said. “People who normally wouldn’t interact, and wouldn’t see themselves as having anything in common, but here they are, and their family stories, in facing pages of this cookbook.

“We saw the power of food and these food stories to really build bridges,” he added. “When the pandemic receded, it seemed like there was an opportunity to try to take what was happening in the pages of the Community Cookbooks and bring it off the page into a series of live events.”

They decided to road-test the concept in March 2023 by inviting two dozen friends – many of whom didn’t know each other – to their home on Ten Apple Farm in Gray for a potluck supper and story-sharing evening themed, “Try Something New.”

They asked guests to bring a dish with a story behind it. After the meal, Schatz and one of his daughters joined a few of the guests taking turns telling stories.

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so amazing,’ ” Schatz recalled. “For the most part, the people who came did not know the majority of people who were there. So they were making connections.”

Studies have shown that when a person tells a story, the listener’s brainwaves synchronize with the brainwaves of the storyteller, a phenomenon that underscores how storytelling builds connections and empathy. And as Schatz sees it, the storytelling was happening all evening long with every interaction guests had with each other.

“What we think of as conversations is essentially storytelling,” he said. “We’re telling each other stories of our lives. That’s just how humans communicate, by telling stories.”

‘I CAME BECAUSE I’M LONELY’

Community Plate’s first official story-sharing supper was in Lubec in June 2023, and Schatz and Hathaway have since put on one or two of the free events a month at community centers around Maine for crowds averaging 50 people. They spread tablecloths over folding tables, and set places with mix-and match china, flatware, jelly jar glasses and cloth napkins they got from thrift stores, along with vases of small flower bouquets, lending the events a kind of rustic elegance.

“It’s very intentional that it’s china, that there are flowers on the table,” said Hathaway. “We don’t want it to feel fancy, but we want it to feel a little elevated. You sit up a little straighter when you have a cloth napkin on your lap.”

“The goal is to elevate the meal to a place where people feel like they’re participating in something special,” said Schatz, who hauls the tableware back home with Hathaway after each supper to wash in their dishwasher and then pack up for the next event. “They then bring their best selves to that, and it creates more openness to connecting with others.”

Community Plate has surveyed event participants over the past year to try to get a sense of the suppers’ impact. Schatz said 99 percent of respondents said they’d made a connection at the events, and 90 percent said the supper made them feel more connected to their communities.

Schatz and Hathaway have seen connections form in real time. At a 2023 supper in Waterville, Schatz started talking with a woman who’d said she didn’t know anyone there.

“I asked her, ‘How did you hear about this?’ She said, ‘I saw the ad on Facebook and I came because I’m lonely,’ ” Schatz said. “And it was the first time I’d heard anyone say that out loud. It was a powerful moment.”

A woman sitting next to them overheard and offered to exchange phone numbers with the other woman so they could go out for coffee the next day. Later in the evening, a third woman introduced herself to those two. “And the three of them, all from very different walks of life, have become good friends,” Schatz said. “We had a supper we did in Skowhegan in July, and all three of them came together.”

Hathaway said another attendee at a 2023 Freeport supper decided to start a monthly potluck in his neighborhood. “That’s the dream,” she said. “That’s exactly what we want to happen.”

Schatz and Hathaway aim to produce a downloadable digital template of the Community Plate events to help make the program scalable, so that anyone can organize and host similar story-sharing suppers by following the same model. Already, the couple publishes mini-cookbooks after each event featuring recipes for the evening’s potluck dishes and the stories behind them; they send them to attendees, free, as a memento of their Community Plate experience.

“Karl and Margaret are fulfilling a very important and necessary need in our communities, and that’s what people respond to,” said Dyan McCarthy-Clark, who was the local coordinator for Community Plate’s East Sangerville event in November. “One gentleman from Charleston at that East Sangerville supper was delighted to come because he said he was seeking positivity and positive connections with others. He went away quite satisfied.

“I’ve seen two Community Plate dinners now, and both of them cemented the idea that people should get together and they should be sharing their stories with other people because it builds a web that makes us stronger as a group,” McCarthy-Clark added.

THE MOTH MEETS CHURCH SUPPER

The Freeport supper marked the start of Community Plate’s fundraising campaign. While the suppers are typically free, the Freeport fundraiser had a suggested donation of $35, with pay-what-you-can options as well. Schatz and Hathaway hope to raise enough to hire a staffer to help them with the undertaking.

“One of the things we struggle with is how to make this sustainable,” Schatz said. “It’s a lot of work. For me, it’s become pretty much like a full-time job that I’ve been doing for a year and a half without salary.”

“They put in a lot of long hours and drive a lot of miles to promote this,” McCarthy-Clark said.

While the suppers usually begin with the potluck meal, and end with the stories, the fundraiser at the Freeport Grange started with some special programming including a conversation hour, during which attendees were encouraged to bid on silent auction items like a pasture-raised Thanksgiving turkey or private tap-dancing lessons.

At the back of the hall, a small group of people spun a wheel of story prompts and took turns launching into stories based on the prompt they landed on: “Share a story that involves a fish.” Grant Roberts of Auburn told the group about the time his friend gaffed a mahi-mahi while they were on a boat in the Bahamas, and how they served it as sushi that night.

There are also table tents bearing a few story prompts set on the dinner tables, which Schatz and Hathaway call “scaffolding for conversation,” a helpful tool for anyone stuck for what to say next.

“To me, it’s like The Moth Radio Hour meets church supper, in all the best ways,” said Heather Kenvin of Portland, who like many at the Freeport Grange event had been to other Community Plate suppers. “It’s an opportunity to have a conversation with someone you haven’t met before, over food, which is something we all enjoy. And it’s a relaxing, low-key environment.”

“After COVID, our community has been really reclusive. Now we are getting out and reaching out,” Nasser Rohani said during conversation hour, noting that it’s the third Community Plate supper he and his wife have attended. At a supper in Biddeford this summer, he befriended a local resident when they discovered they had a common friend in Rochester, New York.

“The most important thing is friendship, and feeling as one family,” Rohani said. “This is a safe environment where we can get together and feel comfortable eating food together and at the same time, making good friends.”

At the side of the hall, potluck buffet tables are filled with dishes, pots and trays of homey classics like butterhorn rolls, challah, lasagna, bagged sandwiches, devilled eggs, chili, fall harvest salad, sweet potato casserole, Texas sheet cake and cookies. The Rohanis, who have also lived in India, brought some crisp baked papadam and what they called a palak paneer “fusion,” with less spicy heat than usual and some Maine potatoes mixed in.

“I enjoy the conversation and the storytelling most,” said Roberts of Auburn while standing in line for food. “The food is like the medium of exchange to get the conversation going. It’s really about the storytelling and making connections. The food’s rather tertiary I think, though it’s still enjoyable.”

“The way things have been going for the past eight or 10 years, we just need to feel good about something,” Schatz said. “And we find at the end of the suppers, through this combination of sharing food and sharing stories, people feel really good.”

GRATEFUL FOR KINDNESS

After supper, over coffee and dessert, the storytelling begins on stage. Some approached the mike to share amusing family anecdotes or gratitude-themed folktales, others read poems of thankfulness. McCarthy-Clark told a story about childhood memories of her Pepe’s annual tradition of breaking down a side of beef using his carbon steel knife and bull’s-head honing steel, century-old items she brought to show the crowd.

The story the Rohanis tell is about the time they drove to Unity to take the “Lobster Roll Express,” a train ride by Unity Pond and through the woods of Waldo County, with lobster rolls for lunch.

They stopped a little beforehand at a thrift store about a mile from the train station. Store staffers were helping Parivash find clothing she liked. She had set down her handbag to try on some clothes, and a short while later she saw the bag – containing the car keys, her credit cards and $85 in cash – was missing. The staffers looked around frantically, but couldn’t find it. They concluded it must have been stolen by another customer while nobody was looking.

The Rohanis weren’t going to let the theft derail their plans, but without the car keys, they couldn’t drive to the train station. So a man at the thrift store offered to drive them, which solved the immediate problem, though they were no less marooned in Unity.

“Just imagine, we have lost our stuff and the key to the car – how can we get back home, two hours away?” Nasser asks the crowd.

The train conductor helped them call the police to report the theft. They enjoyed the train trip nonetheless, and afterward, the Rohanis befriended some people who wanted to take them to Waterville to show them around while they were in the area. Meanwhile, the police reported back to say they found the bag, abandoned in a grocery store. The money was gone, as they expected, but the Rohanis were relieved to find the rest of her belongings were still there.

That evening, the Rohanis received a text from the train conductor and a phone call from the Unity police, each checking to make sure they’d got home safely.

“This name Unity is so befitting of your city,” Parivash said she told the callers, eliciting a big “awwww” from the crowd. “Because truly the citizens are so unbelievably kind. I think about that, I really tear up.”

“Who are these people?” Nasser asks, prompting a big laugh, as he feigns incredulousness over the unexpected caring and kindness they encountered on their trip. “They are people from Maine. Even though we are from away, we really feel at home. We thank you.”