Since the first The Longest Table in Chelsea, New York, pictured above, events have been organized in communities around the country. (Photo via longesttablecommunity.org)
Have a seat at the ‘Longest Table’ in Yellow Springs
- Published: September 3, 2026
On Saturday, Sept. 5, you won’t see cars driving on one block of East South College Street. But you will see chairs and tables lined with food and, local organizers hope, about 300 Yellow Springers.
The village’s first The Longest Table event will be held noon–2 p.m. on East South College Street between Xenia Avenue and Livermore Street. The free gathering asks participants to bring food — “something for themselves and something to share,” organizers told the News last week — along with their own plates and utensils, and sit down to eat with neighbors. If all goes well, those who come out for the communal meal will get to meet and chat with some folks they’ve never met, or get to know folks they’ve met even better.
“This is what people do in this town already,” organizer Toni Dosik said. “We’ve just never done it all together.”
The Longest Table is a national initiative founded in 2022 by Maryam Banikarim and Andrew Lerner, now a project of the nonprofit NYCNext. Coming out of the worst of the pandemic and looking for a way to wade through a prevalent sense of loneliness and disconnection, the founders’ vision was thus: Put a long table in a public place, invite everyone and share a meal. Since the first The Longest Table in Chelsea, New York, events have been organized in communities around the country.
Dosik said she first came across the idea while serving as project director for Livable/Equitable/Age-Friendly Yellow Springs, or LEAF YS. It stayed in the back of her mind, she said, but didn’t become a local project until a family reunion several years later, when she learned that a cousin had helped lead a Longest Table event in Saratoga Springs, New York.
“When the universe aligns, there’s a message,” Dosik said.
She began looking more seriously into bringing the event to Yellow Springs, and eventually recruited her husband, Len Kramer, and a planning group that includes Michael Brown, Kate Anderson, Steve McQueen, Melissa Heston, Jera Oliver and Locksley Harper. Organizers have spent about a year and a half working toward next month’s event, often with advice from a toolkit and workbook supplied by NYCNext at longesttablecommunity.org.
The YS Community Foundation has provided funding toward the event’s roughly $3,000 budget, which includes the rental of tables, chairs, tablecloths and napkins, as well as other supplies. Butter Flower Farm and Glen Garden Gifts are donating flowers, according to Dosik, and Springs Market will provide water, lemonade and ice. The event is also supported by The 365 Project, Antioch College, the Beloved Community Project and LEAF YS.
On the day Dosik and Kramer spoke with the News, about 200 people had already registered for the event. The two said the organizing group is preparing for about 300 diners. Registering in advance will help the event’s organizers estimate how many chairs and tables they’ll need, Kramer said, but it’s not required.
“Just come,” he said. “You’re welcome if you don’t sign up.”
Dosik repeatedly pointed out that The Longest Table isn’t about getting together to solve the village’s issues or work through its disagreements. The village has myriad opportunities to gather in public spaces around the concerns that fill local meeting agendas, she said — and she stressed that those opportunities are important, but they tend to carry the attendant expectations of civic duty. The Longest Table really only asks neighbors to be together and break bread.
The only issue the event might address, in its way, is one Dosik said she noticed via her work with LEAF; surveys conducted by the group in 2021 and 2022 found that some residents felt disconnected from the rhythms of village life.
“There are people who feel more than isolated,” Dosik said. “There are people who feel alienated.”
Though The Longest Table isn’t intended to solve that problem in two hours, “the hope and expectation” for the event, Dosik said, is that “people who normally don’t interact with each other will have an opportunity to do so” — especially folks who aren’t the village’s usual movers and shakers.
Going by early registration, Dosik and Kramer said the event may indeed have drawn people who fit that description: Looking through the names of those who had signed up, both said they encountered many they didn’t recognize despite having lived in Yellow Springs for decades.
“It leads me to believe that these are not just the regular people who show up for everything,” Dosik said.
Kramer said the arrival of new residents to town through recent housing developments is another good reason for opening up The Longest Table — to create a place where longtime and newer Yellow Springers can meet.
“I know there are a lot of people worried about the village changing,” Kramer said. “It will — and we should make an effort to try to talk with new people about what our values are.”
And exchanges like those, he added, don’t have to be part of weighty discussion; just sitting together at a table with someone new, maybe encountering a new idea or perspective, can be enough.
“It doesn’t ever hurt,” Kramer said. “It can only help to hear somebody else’s point of view.”
The organizers of The Longest Table hope it will become an annual event, and Dosik said future gatherings could grow as more residents become familiar with the idea. For its first year, however, she said the organizers aren’t trying to forecast their expectations for the event.
“Just to have something that doesn’t have any purpose other than eat and have fun, and meet and hang out together,” Dosik said. “I think that’s all we expect.”
Those attending should bring something for themselves and something to share, as well as their own place settings. In case of inclement weather, the event’s rain date is Sunday, Sept. 6.
For more information, email longesttableys@gmail.com.
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