Building community one bowl of soup at a time

Sebastopol local Hunter Franks is starting a grassroots microfunding event that uses inclusive community dinner parties to raise money for local projects

Hunter Franks (right) and the 500-person dinner he organized on a freeway in Akron, Ohio.

“Soup” is the word on Sebastopol resident Hunter Franks’ mind these days. “Soup” in the sense of a micro-funding event that supports small, local social projects through community dinner parties.

The concept is simple: A dinner is held in an event space, where a donation of $5-$20 gets a person a bowl of soup and a vote. While everyone eats, four people make 4-minute pitches for low-cost projects which will benefit the community. Everyone votes, and the pitch with the most votes takes home the donations, to “seed fund” the idea.

Projects vary from practical to whimsical. In Detroit, for instance, Soup provided seed money for a grassroots initiative to build benches and install them, guerilla-style, at bus stops. In San Francisco, someone pitched the idea of stringing tin-can phones between houses in the Lower Haight.

Two weeks ago, Franks put out the call on the Facebook group, “What’s Up Sebastopol,” looking to gauge community interest.

“I got an overwhelmingly positive response, and a ton of folks who reached out,” Franks said. He began conversing with 10 or so people, and together they are sorting out the details on how to bring the idea to fruition locally.

The Soup concept dates back to 2007 when InCUBATE, a Chicago-based research group, created it to fund local arts organizations. Grassroots Detroit ran with it from 2010-2025, expanding the funding to encompass all manner of community projects and ultimately hosting quarterly events in nine different neighborhoods.

By 2016, the concept had spread to other cities in the United States and crossed the pond to the U.K. where, according to The Social Change Nest website, more than 70 Soup projects currently operate. Hundreds more are said to be active around the world.

Franks is no stranger to innovative, community-minded events. His website, www.hunterfranks.com, describes the many creative actions he’s undertaken in the United States and abroad to invigorate, promote and redefine community. These projects include a 500-person dinner on a freeway in Akron, Ohio; a storytelling exchange to connect disparate neighborhoods; a swing on a BART car; a year of creative daily lists and many more.

Franks’ Neighborhood Postcard Project has been embraced by 26 communities around the world, and in 2014 his inclusion in GOOD Magazine’s “GOOD 100” emphasized his contributions at “the cutting-edge of creative impact.”

“The thread that kind of runs through all of my work is this desire to have space for connection between people,” Franks said.

He attended a Soup SF dinner at The Red Poppy Art House with 30-40 attendees when he lived in San Francisco 10 or so years ago and was impressed. It’s the simplicity of the idea that appeals to him.

“When I explain it to people, they always get it. And at the end, when I say that the winner goes home with the money from the door, people say, ‘Oh, that’s cool, I like that idea,’” he said.

His current plan is for a local Soup event to be held quarterly, once each season, beginning this spring. A venue will need to be chosen—perhaps the space can be donated by a local restaurant or cafe, after-hours. The event will need to be scheduled and advertised, and an online presence could include a website and a ticketing platform. Importantly, a decision will have to be made on whether to limit the event to Sebastopol proper or to include surrounding towns in west county.

“[With] everything that’s happening on a national scale and a global scale, being able to come back to a local scale gives me a lot of hope and optimism for myself and those around me,” Franks said. “We can’t control sometimes what’s happening on the larger scale, but I think being able to know that you’re living in a place where people care about each other and are wanting to invest in relationships and invest in goodness in the community is something really special.”

Expect to hear more from Hunter Franks about Soup in the coming months. Questions may be emailed to him at hhfranks@gmail.com.

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