Making a Small City Smaller: The Second Annual Community Harvest Dinner in Perry Square
Building social trust through community events
Last year, our first-ever End-of-Season Community Harvest Dinner was held in Perry Square, inviting everyone in the community to sit at a large table and enjoy a free meal prepared by friends and neighbors from produce grown right here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Our original goal was to make this event more than just a meal giveaway. By elevating the dining experience with centerpieces, music, a warm and inviting tent, and expertly prepared food, we aimed to show what was possible when we placed our trust in each other to share our skills and abundance. The turnout was spectacular, and we are very much looking forward to improving and expanding upon the event this year on Friday, Oct. 24 from 6 – 8 p.m. in Perry Square. The dinner also celebrates the end of a successful Pay-What-You-Can Market season, another concept built on trust and mutual aid, built by a dedicated and decentralized system of farmers, volunteers, and organizations aiming to make local fresh produce as accessible as possible in the City of Erie.
Trust is a very important concept for small communities. It can be traded and exchanged just like currency. The problem is, we've increasingly replaced opportunities to trade trust with each other with opportunities to exchange money. Gig economy jobs like Uber drivers have replaced the need to ask a friend for a lift somewhere or to take a turn as the designated driver. In Erie, we've replaced opportunities to coexist in public spaces like our beautiful Bayfront with experiences that require cash (and sometimes a lot of it). The smaller and more interconnected a city is, the more it benefits from a strong sense of social trust. Or conversely, the more it suffers from distrust.
The reason I love working in community events planning is that I can design experiences that exist for the sole benefit of building social capital. I can create free experiences that invite the community in to share something together, connect with each other, then part ways a little richer without having to exchange cash. The Erie Downtown Partnership also exists to help build consumer density for our downtown businesses, but I like to think that even those business owners benefit first from the trust they can build by meeting potential customers face to face during our events. Investing in building authentic relationships with customers, especially in a small city, is worth double the energy you're putting into your social media campaign. Trust is the most important thread that can bind a community together. The belief that your neighbor will help you without expecting anything in return is what connects and strengthens social bonds to come out the other side of a natural disaster like a storm or blizzard intact.
This summer we saw a lot of trust built through the Pay-What-You-Can Farmers Market stands, and it was not always easy. Several neighbors would arrive at the stand with a mindset of competition and even outright contempt for others there, seeing their own neighbors as a threat to their ability to get the produce they need. People would argue about line jumping and bicker with each other about what was an appropriate amount to take and what was an appropriate amount to donate in return. We attempted to meet these reactions (to what was admittedly a foreign concept for most) with the same patience, compassion, and set of guidelines:
- Give what you feel you can give
- Take what you feel you need to take
- Don't worry about what anyone else can give or needs to take.
By the time we were holding our end-of-season harvest dinner, most repeat market attendees' attitudes had at least cooled a bit and they were more comfortable with the notion that someone else's needs were no threat to their own.
This is a very difficult concept to wrap one's head around, especially for working class and impoverished populations who have learned to carefully protect what little they have. It's a natural survival instinct that crops up in times of scarcity, and no one should be blamed for feeling this way. The real threat is a system that runs on a constant manufactured scarcity mindset. Hypercapitalism has led to an environment where exploitative marketing is allowed to manipulate our perception of scarcity to elicit an emotional (and monetary) response. To continue the cycle of constant growth needed to feed a hypercapitalist economy, people must resort to more and more competitive, desperate, and intensifying tactics to squeeze money out of an exhausted population. They legalize vices like sports gambling and drugs as new revenue streams to create new sectors, new gold rushes, that might pour just a tiny bit more gasoline onto the dying fire.
Trust is not just anathema to the system, it's also the antithesis. If we build more trust, we would have no fear of this manufactured scarcity. If we had no fear of scarcity, we might share more. If we share more, we would all trust each other more. It's a cycle that needs to start somewhere. The easiest place to start is by doing something for someone without expecting anything in return. In fact, try to outright refuse anything in return. The more we attempt to squeeze money out of every interaction the more we sacrifice things like trust and create an unwelcoming environment out of our entire city, and that benefits no one except those who seek to divide us.
The Community Harvest Dinner on Friday, Oct. 24 in Perry Square is presented by Erie Downtown Partnership and the Erie Food Policy Advisory Council with support from Build CDC, Hamot Health Foundation, Grow and Glow Urban Collective, Wildfield Urban Farm, Erie Farm to School, the Conscious Food Project at Raintree Farms, and Groundwork Erie. Made possible by Erie Strayer with additional support provided by ErieBank, First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, Brian and Linda Graff, Ember and Forge, Monahan and Monahan, Glass Growers Gallery, PA Cyber, and 1020 Collective. Thanks also to our many volunteers!
David Tamulonis is a musician and educator who works at Erie Downtown Partnership managing community events and activities in Downtown Erie. He can be reached at davidtamulonis@gmail.com.
