Soup Pitch Dinner

The dinner grew out of a graduate school project by Kate Daughdrill, an art student at Cranbrook, who borrowed the idea from a Chicago group called InCUBATE that funded creative projects through Sunday soup dinners. Daughdrill teamed up with singer Jessica Hernandez, whose family owned the bakery, and a loose crew of local musicians and artists. They called it Detroit SOUP.

Amy Kaherl showed up as a volunteer, wanting, in her words, to “do something important for the city,” and became its engine. On the first Sunday of every month, she and a team of volunteers turned an empty space in Southwest Detroit into what one profile called a communal living room. Anyone could pitch: urban farms, coats for the homeless, job training for folks leaving prison. The room ate, asked questions, argued kindly, and voted. Within two years, SOUP had grown from a few dozen folks to more than 400, and its $500 to $1,000 micro-grants had launched 16 projects, including The Empowerment Plan, which went on to employ homeless women manufacturing coats that turn into sleeping bags.

The money is the excuse, though. Kaherl says the community the dinner builds matters just as much as the grants, “it is not unusual for strangers to share a meal and leave as friends.” The pitch gives the whole room something to talk about, and the vote gives everyone a stake. Winning ideas got better through the questions, and losing ideas often found helpers anyway in the conversations afterward.

Sources

UIX people and projects profiled: Amy Kaherl — Tunde Wey and Claire Nelson, Model D, April 2012.