Table Talks: Food, Power & Our Future

A low-pressure gathering, not a meeting. Food and music are present. The only ask: name one person, one place, or one thing in your community that grounds you. Facilitators use it to quietly map who already knows whom, and where the natural connectors sit.

Where did the collard greens on the table come from — who grew them, who owned that land, who profited? This session grounds the series in history and identity, tracing how Black and rural communities' relationships to land and food have been disrupted by policy and displacement, and introduces food sovereignty as the right to define, grow, and profit from your own food system.

The Census, made concrete: how proposed changes to the American Communities Survey — especially the disabilities question — could make thousands of Oklahomans statistically invisible, and how an undercounted ZIP code loses the small business and economic development dollars its own business corridor depends on.

The pivot session. Participants name the difference between "Power Over" — landlords, banks, institutions — and "Power With" — the sewing circle, the block club, the business association. The message that closes it: your numbers are your leverage, whether you have a storefront or a walker.

The skills session. Participants practice the one-to-one organizing conversation — listening for what someone actually cares about — and build a personal Power Map: the banker who denied the loan, the council member who ignored the request, the neighbor who quietly drives referrals to half the block.

The tone shifts to full agitation. Real bills — what passed, what failed, what never got introduced — and who was left out of those rooms: business owners needing capital, entrepreneurs needing a workforce pipeline, disabled residents needing healthcare protection. Participants leave with the language and priorities they'll carry to the Capitol.