The Power of Showing Up: My Women Over Dinner Story

by Kelly Towers

I attended my first Women Over Dinner in Harlem in March of 2024. My old college bestie, Cara Joy Brand, had been collaborating to get the nonprofit dinner program off its feet. After sharing with her that I had been struggling with my sobriety, Cara invited me to attend. I had no clue what to expect, except that there would not be wine served—this was relief enough for me to go and trust.

My father always said, “Be all things, to all people,” and I wore that motto like a proud badge in all my years of being in the hospitality industry. Somewhere in the time from running a resort, to becoming a freelancer and quarantining for a pandemic, I seemed to have lost the skills, or they changed, or I simply just didn’t feel like using them anymore. But on this one night in Harlem around a table with mostly strangers, I was reminded that I have a voice and that my voice has an impact on others.

Women Over Dinner is a global movement aiming to have all women reconnect to their inestimable power. A meal is shared as women connect through answering a series of curated prompts about our own impact, power, our liberation. The specific format is designed to give space for each woman’s unique brilliance to emerge and be seen. There is no discussion or crosstalk during shares, making this a rare space for women to express without feedback and listen without pressure to respond.

It felt so enlivening to be heard and to be patient enough to have heard others. How simple, I thought. Just creating the space for each to share pierced open something in me and I could feel it happening all over in the room to others too. Nothing had felt like this in a while, or even ever.

I left with a WOD dinner kit sealed with a stamp of a mushroom. When I inquired about the mushroom, Cara explained the mycelium network to me and how each of us women are interconnected running everything underneath the ground. I wanted more of this connection!

Learning about Unconditional Freedom ignited me. Studying The Eros Sutras and Art of Addiction reshaped my life, showing me how to plug-in and be of service to others. Volunteering at Free Food became a family affair when we were in the city. Leaning into The Prison to Monastery reform movement seemed like the very best place to start rebuilding society. I’m honored to be a part of a movement that resonates daily by being an admin for the Women Are Power (WAP) Facebook page. I even launched my first podcast called Eros in Astrology! All of this came from me saying yes to dinner that night.

Bringing WOD to my area in upstate NY fully displayed the mycelium network. Women at the dinners I held seemed so tapped in. Their shares about the need for the infusion of the feminine, how they felt their power, where they maybe dropped it along the way, the knowing and the owning–it was powerful!

It is vital for all women everywhere to get to touch back into the place that these events create space for. That interior space of remembering who we are, what being a woman really means, and that shared space of rich, abundant sisterhood and connection with other women. This remembrance is especially crucial for our sisters who are incarcerated because incarceration is such a deeply dehumanizing experience. In December WOD hosted a dinner at the Taconic Women’s Correctional Facility. This was our first dinner at an incarceration unit, but it is not our last. WOD is working with Dr. Topeka K Sam, a criminal justice reformer, to do ten prison dinners a year!

Bringing women together, serving nourishing food, being of great service to others, honoring my hospitality skill set, growing and nurturing sistership, and helping create safe spaces for shares, all feel like a form of self-flourishing. Ramping it up this month, I get to be a table lead at our next WOD being held at Providence House in Brooklyn, which is linked here: https://www.providencehouse.org/. I want what all women want and what all men can want for women too—to live in a world where the inestimable and inherent power of Woman is not just remembered, but expressed freely. Openly. Intimately. How do we do it? One dinner at a time….

This is your invitation to host a Women Over Dinner. Will you help us spread the dinners far & wide?
To learn more visit: https://womenoverdinner.org/

Kelly is a lead volunteer in the Women Over Dinner initiative. She’s a wife, daughter, sub-contractor, has Cool Aunt status, and lives in The Finger Lakes Region in Upstate New York.