Ten Years In, Southwest Is Still Setting a Place for Everyone
There is a particular quality of evening light that falls over water in late summer and on August 9, that light fell over the Southwest Duck Pond in Southwest DC, where more than sixty-five neighbors had gathered to do something that sounds almost old-fashioned to describe: eat together, dance a little, make something with their hands, and write a few words to people they may never meet. This year marked the tenth year of Southwest Business Improvement District’s (SWBID) Community Tables. If you sat down at the tables, you’d see all the attendees more or less practicing the same small art of paying attention to the place they call home.
Cities can be designed to generate a sense of belonging, and, in this sense, cities are similar to other designed systems. Urban designers know that there are limitations to measuring a neighborhood’s health using property values and statistics. There are softer, harder-to-quantify measures of a neighborhood’s health, such as how often a stranger becomes a familiar face.
Community Tables is ultimately about creating opportunities for neighbors to connect. This year, SW Catering, a Westminster Church affiliate, provided the meal, which gave everyone a chance to sit together and catch up. The evening also included a movement lesson with instructor Blake Robinson set to Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” a “Wishes for Southwest” craft project led by Christina Hernandez, and a postcard-writing activity called “Postcards to Self, Friends, Neighbors, and Strangers.” Each activity offered a different way to participate, whether that meant dancing, getting creative, or taking a few quiet minutes to write.
Beth Ferraro of The Art Island, who has curated the program since 2017, describes the goal in the plainest possible terms. “Whether you’ve lived here for decades or just moved in last week, we want you at the table.” There’s an optimism embedded in that sentence that’s easy to overlook—hope that people who show up as strangers will leave as something else, and that this transformation doesn’t require much. It’s the kind of hope that doesn’t announce itself as hope. It just quietly assumes the best about people and then creates the conditions for them to prove it right.
Lori, who has lived in Southwest for eleven years, offered the kind of observation that rarely makes it into a headline but says everything. “Because of events like this, I can go to Safeway or the Farmer’s Market and always see someone I can say hi to.” Social scientists have spent decades documenting the erosion of what was known as social capital—the relationships, clubs, and everyday gatherings that once stitched neighborhoods together. What’s easy to miss in that larger, gloomier story is that the stitching can still happen. It just has to be done with purpose now.
That might be the real success of ten years of Community Tables: showing that community can grow over time. After ten years, the ducks are still there—and, just as importantly, so are the people.
