Dinner Diplomacy
Dinner Diplomacy offers visiting professionals from around the world the opportunity to spend a casual evening in the home of a Seattle-area community member. We are proud of the involvement of our volunteers and the important role they play as citizen diplomats. Volunteer hosts include all types - some with large homes and some with apartments and roommates. We encourage diversity! Through this opportunity, international visitors learn about the Puget Sound community, get a glimpse of day-to-day life, and come away with lifelong friends. Hosts have the opportunity to make international friends and learn about other cultures and global issues right in their own homes.
Who are the participants?
We welcome hundreds of international visitors annually, on professional exchange programs sponsored primarily by the State Department and occasionally by private sector partners. These international visitors are emerging global leaders from around the world in a wide variety of sectors and have been competitively selected or nominated for participation in these exchange programs. While traveling through the United States, visitors usually stay in hotels, so the chance to meet with locals over dinner in their home is an especially important and highly enjoyable part of their program.
What is required of volunteer hosts?
Volunteers provide a casual dinner for a small group of visitors. Visitors will be staying in a downtown hotel and will take a taxi/Uber/Lyft to your home for dinner. You decide how many guests you can host and what time you'd like for them to arrive. If the guests are not fluent in English, interpreters will accompany each group to dinner and will be included in the number of guests each volunteer can host.
What does the World Affairs Council provide?
You'll receive information about your guests, including their professional background, the purpose of their trip to Seattle, and any dietary restrictions. We also help to arrange transportation for the visitors.
What happens afterwards?
Feel free to exchange contact information or connect on social media with your international guests to stay connected with them after they leave Seattle. Please share with us any feedback about the evening, suggestions for how we could improve the experience, and photos: glx@world-affairs.org
Here are some other tips from one of our superstar dinner diplomats, Bruce!
- Invite a friend or two in order to give the visitors more connection to Americans, as well as to keep the conversation going while you’re serving food. Ideally they will be people with a connection to the topic of the visit, but mostly they should just be interesting conversationalists. If they speak the language of some of the visitors, that’s a plus. Encourage them to learn some basics about the countries of the visitors.
- Choose a menu that requires minimal work after the guests arrive, so you can focus on them.
- While appetizers are nice, visitors are sometimes hesitant to attack finger food, especially when it’s served on a common plate and no one wants to go first. It might be best to have appetizers while seated and/or serve them individually.
- Guests might welcome a brief home tour. While that might seem pretentious to you, it’s often interesting to see how people in other countries live.
Other resources:
https://halalfoodcouncilusa.com/halal-food-101-understanding-the-basics-of-halal-food-2/