Dear Dinner Party Community, 

We’re writing to share the thing we hoped to never write (and indeed that we fought hard, for years, to avoid): We’ve decided to sunset The Dinner Party. 

When we set out, the mission was to transform life after loss. Over the last 16 years, we have connected 20,000 young grievers to each other in over 150 cities. We’ve normalized conversations about grief for young people across the country. We are immensely proud of this work, the connections made around Tables, the relationships flourishing through phone calls, the myriad of ways this community has shown up for each other. and the relationships that have seen people through so much.

This decision was not and is not an easy one, but neither is it unfamiliar. Funding crises hitting nonprofits (and beyond) are pervasive. We, too, have watched as some of our favorite small businesses and fellow doers of good have had to close up shop. Roughly a quarter of registered nonprofits ended 2024 in a deficit, and that number was likely higher in the last year. Even with this unrivaled community of ours pitching in relentlessly, individual giving simply can't keep up to fill the gaps, and it shouldn’t have to.

This challenge also isn’t new. We live in a world that treats community as commodity, that often values top-down and short-term approaches to care, and that insists on grief with an end-date. The result is that this work has always been hard to fund. 

Many of you were with us just three years ago, when we faced another funding crisis. You rallied with astonishing speed and power, doing what many thought could not be done. But as we’ve continued to grow, we’ve since found ourselves having to return with asks more and more often. In the end, the decision, while not easy, was simple: We refuse to outsource our support systems to bots, or act in any way that feels outside of our integrity, as an organization and as a community. We refuse to risk becoming something we do not wish to be. And we want to center the opportunities for this community to tell the story and find its own legacy and live on, on its own terms. In one way, the organization is ending. In another way, we’re making sure its legacy gets to be defined by you. 

This is the perfect community to come together to model a good ending, an ending that should not—and with your help, will not—be immediate: Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to train as many Hosts and to connect as many people on our waitlist as we can, knowing that those relationships can endure far beyond the length of any organization. We’re looking to share our learning and tools with other practitioners in the grief field, and anyone cultivating the kind of community that begets real and lasting and surprising friendships. We hope to celebrate what we've built together: online, and in the more than 150 cities and towns that Dinner Partiers call home, whether there's one Table (looking at you, Kansas City), or twenty-three (hey, New York). To help this effort to close with care, please make a gift here. 

While it’s painful to close when we’re connecting more people than ever, opening more Tables than ever, and seeing more demand than ever, it also feels fitting that this organization would end not as a product of burnout or irrelevance but at a moment when the community is most poised to keep the conversations and connections alive. We’ve been honored to learn so much from you about what it means to redefine life after loss, to take agency in the legacies we’re bound up with, to show up with truth in hard times. This work is never done. But thanks to you, we are hardly alone in doing it anymore. 

Please continue to gather—as Buddies, Tables, and neighbors of all sorts. Please continue to show up for new and seasoned grievers in all your day-to-day ways. And over the coming weeks (and months, and years to come), please join us in telling and shaping the legacy of this beautiful web of grievers. For more information on what this means practically and for answers some of the questions you might be holding you can go here. 

While The Dinner Party may be coming to a close as an organization, everything you’ve brought and learned here will continue to shape the people and communities around us all. Life after loss, indeed. 

With gratitude + care,

MP Diaz-Frasene, Executive Director

Lennon Flowers, Founding Executive Director