What is The Neighborhood's Table?

The Neighborhood's Table is a new initiative from Studio ATAO that aims to create a responsible development framework for hospitality businesses in gentrifying areas to organically integrate into their community, and work together with their neighbors to combat displacement and invest sustainably in their neighborhoods. 

Our goals for this initiative are three-fold:

1. Document, highlight, and amplify the existing practices of organizations and businesses in gentrifying areas that have yielded positive results for community members.
2. Structure a collaborative system for individuals, community organizers, businesses, developers, and policymakers to brainstorm and experiment with new programs that center the needs of the most affected community members.
3. Integrate proven positive development strategies into a hospitality-specific framework, with actionable resources for implementation, that all hospitality business owners can apply in their efforts to combat displacement and support their neighborhoods. 

We hope that together these actions will encourage a larger shift in how private businesses approach the communities they operate in and, in turn, build coalitions between individuals, community organizations, and businesses to influence future policies and practices. 

For more information about this initiative, including the problem as we see it and our goals for 2022, check out our website.

With your support, we can:

• Onboard & compensate 4 expert Advisors.
• Organize, facilitate & compensate regular neighborhood stakeholder gatherings to brainstorm & experiment with new anti-gentrification programs. The learnings from these programs will be detailed in the final toolkit.
• Pay our internal staff & freelancers equitably.
• Publish our Understanding Gentrification primer & final toolkit, How Hospitality Businesses Can Take a Community-Invested, Anti-Gentrification Stance in Their Neighborhoods, with actionable resources.
• Host public learn-along events as well as Town Halls to create a rubric for media for evaluating hospitality businesses on their relationship to gentrification as part of coverage.

About Us

At Studio ATAO, we believe that a radically different future requires unconventional ideas that haven't been tested before. We are a nonprofit that creates educational tools, resources, and spaces for individuals and organizations to advance systems-based change through a social justice lens and the all-affected principle. Our vision is a world where all people can realize their power to secure equitable and inclusive change. 

As a community-driven think tank, we aim to center the individuals and groups most affected by sociopolitical change and use their recommendations for structural overhaul as the basis of organizational and policy change. Instead of allowing change to be dictated through a top-down approach, often from the very people in power benefiting the most from existing inequities, our work focuses on implementing new ideas that pull at the roots of systematic issues. (Read more about our methodology here). 

As we prepare the resources necessary for another impactful year and for our main project of 2022, The Neighborhood's Table, will you support our work uplifting the recommendations of community members most affected by future change?

Studio ATAO is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Our EIN is 82-2171680. 

For gift opportunities and fundraising-specific questions, please contact our Director of Operations, Karen Kumaki, at [email protected].