Norway is no stranger to community dinners. Lights Out Gallery hosted a Little Sparks potluck in August of 2023. Submitted photo

NORWAY — Woodstock resident Elizabeth Hartford’s time is mostly focused on sharing food with the Oxford Hills community through her work at MaineHealth Stephens Hospital Food Pantry, or by volunteering with Alan Day Community Garden and other organizations.

Hartford is organizing an event centered around food March 9 at The Progress Center on Cottage Street, connecting neighbors at a Community Plate gathering to share potluck and stories.

A “community weaver,” Hartford discovered Community Plate’s Story Sharing Supper as she researched ways to devise community connections. She was viewing projects out-of-state only to find out that Community Plate was just down the road in Gray.

As presented by founders Karl Schatz and Margaret Hathaway, a Community Plate get-together is based on sharing pot-luck meals and recipes, and is capped off with participants taking turns sharing theme-based stories to connect diners.

Karl Schatz and Margaret Hathaway are the founders of “Community Plate,” a nonprofit which hosts a series of story-sharing potluck suppers around the state. Carl D. Walsh/Portland Press Herald

“They provide the plates and we provide the food,” Hartford quipped. “They set the theme, and we provide the location.”

Details for Norway’s Story Sharing Supper can be found on Community Plate’s event schedule webpage, www.communityplate.me/events/story-sharing-supper-norway-2025.

After reaching out to Schatz and Hathaway about organizing a Story Sharing Supper in Norway, Hartford turned to friends Daniel Sipe and Katey Branch to help her make it happen.

“It wasn’t something I could do by myself,” Hartford said. “So I connected with Daniel and Katey, and the three of us are working it together.

“The idea is bringing together people who might not know each other.” she added. “There will be plenty of food, and then there will be storytelling to provide a bit of entertainment.”

During the supper, storytellers will share vignettes about themselves connected to the dinner theme. The theme for the March 9 dinner is “spring forward,” as it happens to be the first day of daylight savings time.

“What happens when you register,” Hartford explained, “you check whether you will bring a potluck or not. But they will send an email back with some conversation starters based, on the theme, so you can think about what story you might want to tell to the person you’re sitting next to.”

The other cool part that will result, Hartford said, is a community cookbook.

“You bring a recipe — maybe for what you bring or anything else — and they are all collected at the end into a Norway community cookbook,” she said.

Community Plate events began popping up in communities around Maine two years ago, starting at Schatz’s and Hathaway’s home, and then expanding to communities throughout the region, including one in Freeport late last year.

“As a culture, we are not getting together as often as most of us would like,” Hathaway told the Portland Press Herald then. “Getting together for a community potluck doesn’t seem like an essential thing, but it kind of is, because we see what happens when you don’t know the people around you.”

“Breaking bread, in all forms of the phrase, is essential to building a stronger community,” said Sipe. “Through eating a meal together, made by many hands, we can learn more about each other, from the seeds that grew the vegetables in the yard to the history of families and traditions that shape the place we live.”