Partner With Us
Are you an organisation or institution looking to build connections in your community?
Contact hello@welcomedinnerproject.org to find out more.
Partner with us in a suburb for a year
Since 2013, The Welcome Dinner Project has been working directly with community members and their trusted leaders at a suburb level to engage with our model. We have developed best practice approaches to community development based on a evaluation process balanced with both qualitative and quantitative data.
As each community is different in each suburb due to demographics, needs, resources, and points of engagement, we undertake community specific scoping before designing our activation approach, followed by the development of a bespoke community engagement and activation plan.
Broadly speaking, our approach in each suburb over a 12 month period includes a cycle of:
- Trust building activation events to build familiarity and legitimacy of our brand in the community through campaigns, stalls and speaker events
- Facilitator training, giving community members high quality professional skills that help them hold space for guests to have transformational experiences at our events
- Community Welcome Dinners, enabling community members to come together in a high energy event in safe and trusted community spaces
- follow up Home Welcome Dinners, enabling community members to deepen their connections
- story sharing events that enable activated community members to reflect on and share their transformative experiences
Partner with us for one-off events
Community Welcome Dinners take place in a trusted community space such as a library, shopping centre, neighbourhood house, community centre or park and provide an opportunity for guests to ‘try-out’ a welcome dinner in a public space, building trusting sentiments in communities on a large scale. During these events, between 50 and 100 newly arrived and established Australians share a meal together.
Home Welcome Dinners are our main focus in supporting community members to share a connection over food, but we know that making this the first point of contact for some of our guests may be a challenge. We find that once community dinners have been run in an area, people are more confident to attend a smaller, more intimate dinner in a neighbour’s home, and often want to sign up as a guest at a home dinner, offer to host a dinner, and at times, wish to join our community as a volunteer.
Facilitation Training we train people in your organisation with high level facilitation skills to run their own Welcome Dinners.
Foster introductions
We are always interested in partnering with the right organisations to leverage existing resources in the community for the benefit of community members. If you know of individuals or organisations that would be interested in partnering with us, please consider introducing us to them.
What we are looking for in partnerships
- You share our values
- You are keen to share financial and in-kind resources
- You are interested in learning deeply about the issues affecting communities and how we can work together with people at the grass-roots to create transformative change
To find out about collaborating with us, contact hello@welcomedinnerproject.org.
We loved working with you to bring about this fantastic event, we all had a great time and can’t wait to do it all again!
– HYPA Adelaide (community collaborator)
