OpenSeat Playful Feasts

This unique gathering is designed to bring parents and children together to engage in play, conversation, and delicious food around the dinner table. As a meal campaign of the OpenSeat meal-hosting platform, this idea aims to foster meaningful connections between parents, caretakers and their children, strengthening family bonds and creating lasting memories. Mealtime can be more than just eating; it can be a time of creativity, discovery, education and most fundamentally social connection.

Using feast guidelines developed by the OpenSeat team, you are invited to host meals for parents and children — in which they eat, play, talk and learn together.

The Playful Feast idea grew out of OpenSeat's desire to find novel ways to decrease social isolation and disconnection through people sharing meals together.

By creating a platform to facilitate social connection through food and conversation around shared tables, OpenSeat's vision is to help build genuine communities around South Africa and eventually worldwide by enabling people to connect meaningfully and memorably – in particular those from different backgrounds and viewpoints. OpenSeat's ethos is centred on several interrelated ideas.

The first is that eating, conversing, and community-building are inextricably linked. A second is that authenticity is best achieved through the social rituals of food and sitting together around a table or within a carefully-prepared environment. The third core idea is that good hospitality is an experience that humanises people, conferring dignity on everyone who has a seat at the table. The final core idea is that experiences of physical, in-person community are healthier and far more fulfilling than virtual community mediated through online interactions.

OpenSeat arose out of a conversation between the co-founders Callum Oberholzer and Matt Cole. Matt was working in Sweden for a season and craved a more authentic experience of community. As Callum recalls, “Matt said it was hard to build community and meet people. He wanted to experience dinner with a Swedish family. 'Imagine if there was an app for this, like we find accommodation on Airbnb?'”

Meal-based hospitality can be used for multiple purposes — whether helping foreigners like Matt find a local home and family for dinner, bringing together leaders from different communities in post-conflict situations, or — in the case of Playful Feasts — enabling fun and meaningful interactions between parents and children.