About our organization
At The Dinner Party, we are looking for opinions and stories from people who, however scared or hurt or frustrated they may be, want to really talk about our country. We want to hear from good people who are willing to believe others are good, even when fear and doubt and anger are screaming in them. We want to know what you want to see change in the United States, and what you imagine that might look like. We want to foster kinder, longer, conversations than those possible on social media. We want to create a space to ask genuine questions of people who you cannot quite understand. The editors at The Dinner Party are committed to publishing opinions we agree with and opinions we disagree with, in big ways and small. We want to hear from anyone in America who is also ready to listen. If this is you, please see our guidelines and our submission form on the Submission page on this website. You can find it using the page tabs above.
About our team
It is important to The Dinner Party that we are transparent about our viewpoints as individual team members. We hope that this will help us make sure our political biases are not invisibly reflected in what we publish and that we can stick to our core mission of fostering conversations among a wide variety of viewpoints.
If you'd like to be involved with this project, please reach out to us at the Contact page above. We want to include a variety of perspectives on our team, as well as in our content.
Editor-in-Chief - Graham Foster (he/him/his)
"I would describe myself as very left-leaning socially and economically questioning, or open to exploration. I am most concerned about issues of human rights for people regardless of their identities, including racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people. To me, this means that everyone should have access to food, shelter, healthcare, and basic freedoms. I believe that governments should invest in their citizens and that a nation's ability to trust the government and fellow citizens is critical to the success and survival of that nation. Economically, I don't have a perfect solution, but feel that human values are missing from our current economic system, where making money always seems to come above being decent, caring for people, and caring for our planet."
Chief Technical Officer - Clara Datum (she/her/hers)
"I consider myself a Libertarian Socialist. When I vote, my primary concern is always civil rights. To me, that includes free and available health care, financial services, self-identification rights, rights to bodily autonomy, etc. My secondary concerns are economic policies. I support policies that are harsh on the growth mindset of corporate America. I believe Amazon and large corporations like it are bad for US citizens. That monopolization and growth not only stifle our abilities to build naturally occurring strong communities but also devastate our planet's well-being. My tertiary concerns are foreign politics and defense. I believe the issues that have my attention here in the USA are also important abroad. That said, I rarely support uninvited military intervention of any kind by any country anywhere. There is a line between supportive/aid actions and military actions that I believe is crossed too often. Furthermore, defense should only apply to defense. In my opinion, the US uses our "defense budget" to go on the offense frequently; exceeding the needs of domestic safety. I realize many of my beliefs sound like ones associated with anarchy, but I do not subscribe to that ideology. Instead, like our editor-in-chief, I believe in a government that invests in its citizens and provides a bureaucratic structure that keeps its citizens served and safe. That includes having an economic system with a centralized form of currency."