Our Mission

We believe there is power in coming together around the table. A shared meal and a shared story with neighbors invites the deepening of relationships, bridging of divisions, and strengthening of trust. Oak Ridge Periodic Tables welcomes all to the table, knowing that we are stronger together.

Our Vision

In science, the Periodic Table is a list of individual elements that are unique and sorted by their atomic weight. But in order for life to exist these elements must bond together. Communities work in the same way. People need to find each other and make the connections that bring both harmony and stability to the world. These bonds are what uphold us, and they are formed by time and trust. We invite you to bring yourself and your story to our table to build, strengthen, and reimagine the bonds of community. Join us at Periodic Tables in 2023.

Oak Ridge is a city founded during a global conflict that left no life untouched and brought people together from all over the world. Similarly, 2020-2022 were years marked by the Covid-19 crisis and a similar opportunity is before us to come together again, in ways that we couldn’t imagine when the city was founded. The impact of the pandemic, like that of every crisis, was experienced differently by each of us. While it is true that grief left few untouched, it is also true that we are not all grieving the same things. After months of social distancing, it’s time to come together.

The aim of Periodic Tables is to create opportunities where we can renew our bonds of friendship and community by listening to one another’s stories.

Together with The People’s Supper, a nationally-renowned effort seeking to build relational trust among people of different identities and perspectives — and a twist that is uniquely Oak Ridge — we are out to pave a new path. 

The supper series in 2023 will be offered around a variety of topics, many of them centered around “reclaiming stories” that have too long been disregarded or remained unheard in our community. Supporting the Scarboro 85, people with disability, and inviting members of our homeless population to share their stories are samples of the kinds of things we will be doing in 2023.  

We’ll be gathering the collective wisdom of our community through shared meals and conversation, revealing in the stories ways we might better support and understand one another in times of crisis, grief, or anxiety. Additionally, we hope to better frame this issues and point to the question: “Where do we go from here?”

We hope you will join us and support our community as we heal and grow together. Imagine the impact in Oak Ridge and beyond, if we each pull a chair up to the table.