Vision Dinner

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A script for your own table. Four to eight people, any table — a kitchen, a restaurant back room, a park picnic blanket. Print it, read from your phone, follow it loosely, or read it word for word. Either way, it runs itself in about forty minutes.

Kids welcome. Food shared. Nobody pays.

Nobody hosts this but you. There’s no guest list to send anywhere, and no one is coming from outside. You pick the table, you pick the food, you run the night, in your own name.

What you need

• A table and four to eight chairs.
• Food — a potluck, takeout, or just snacks. However you’d normally feed people.
• Three questions, written down. Copy them onto index cards, write them on a paper tablecloth, or just print this page and set it in the middle.
• The harvest sheet below, printed or copied out by hand, plus a pen.
• Forty minutes, once the food is out, mostly uninterrupted.
• Optional: one phone at the table for the harvest link at the end. Not required — paper works fine.

The 40-minute script

Read these lines out loud if that’s easier, or just use them as a guide for what happens when.

0:00 — Welcome (5 minutes)

Once people are seated and eating, something like:

“Thanks for coming. Tonight we’re going to talk about this city for about forty minutes — what we love about it, what’s broken, and what we want it to become. There’s one rule: everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice. If you’re quiet, that’s fine — we’ll come back to you. If there’s a kid at this table, their answers count exactly as much as anyone else’s.”

That’s the whole rule. Nothing else to set up.

0:05 — First course: what you love (10 minutes)

Ask question one. Go around the table once, in order. Nobody interrupts. If someone passes, come back to them at the end of the round — don’t skip them for good.

0:15 — Second course: what’s broken (10 minutes)

Ask question two. Same rule: one full round before anyone speaks twice. A cross-street or a specific corner is a nice detail but never required — “the buses near me” is a complete answer.

0:25 — Third course: Toronto in 2030 (10 minutes)

Ask question three. This is the round where people tend to talk over each other, because it’s the fun one. Hold the rule anyway for the first pass, then open it up for a few minutes if there’s time and appetite.

0:35 — The harvest (3 minutes)

“Before we finish, let’s write this down so it isn’t lost. One vision, one complaint, one nomination each — whatever you already said tonight, or a better version of it.”

Pass the harvest sheet around. Each person calls out or writes in their own line. Three minutes if it moves briskly.

0:38 — Close (2 minutes)

“That’s it. Thanks for your night. There’s a link on the sheet if anyone wants to put this online — the paper works fine on its own either way.”

Go back to dessert.

The three questions

Copy these three, in order, onto placemats or cards. Nothing else needs to go on them.

1. What do you love about this city that you’d protect?

2. What’s broken that you walk past every day?

3. Toronto in 2030 should ___?

The harvest sheet

Copy this out by hand, print it, or just use a blank page. No names go on it — just the answers.

Number of people at this table tonight: ___

For each person, in any order:

1. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
2. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
3. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
4. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
5. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
6. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
7. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________
8. Vision: _________________________ Complaint: _________________________ Nomination: _________________________

Vision = “Toronto in 2030 should ___.” Complaint = what’s broken — a cross-street is optional, never required. Nomination = a neighbourhood superhero nobody’s noticed yet: the engineer driving a cab, the retired nurse next door.

One form holds all three, if the table wants to put it online: unitetolove.ca/harvest (print this as a QR code if you can, or just write out the address).

Before typing anything in, check with the table that they’re fine with it going online — it’s their words, not yours to submit without asking. The host can type these in later, or the table can just keep its own copy of the paper. Either way, nothing is lost.

If the online form isn’t live yet, the paper is the record — nothing is lost.

Hosting notes

Mixed tables beat matched tables. If everyone already agrees on everything, the conversation is pleasant but thin. A table with a mix of ages, opinions, and how long people have lived here produces better answers than a table of people who already think alike.

The quiet-voice rule matters more than it sounds like it should: everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice. It’s the whole facilitation trick, and it costs nothing. It just means the loudest person at the table doesn’t become the only person at the table.

Kids’ answers count. Write them down exactly as said, even if they’re short, strange, or run long. “More slides” is a vision. “The dog park smells bad” is a complaint. Don’t clean them up.

Translation

Translate this kit — a one-page translation is itself a civic act. Priority languages (per the multilingual program, pending census confirmation): Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Urdu, Tagalog, Spanish, Tamil, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Farsi, Bengali. Send translations through the same link.

A free, open kit. Copy it, change it, translate it, make it yours. — uniteTOlove.ca